Content area
Full text
Whenever I am asked, "where are we?" I am tempted to respond with a question-a linguistic strategy that is popularly considered to be a Ghanaian trait where Ghanaians have the tendency to answer questions with questions. The question I normally ask is this: who are "we"? For how can I tell you where we are, when I do not know who we are? In the context of this where-we-are article, I choose to think of "we" as those who find that a Ghanaian who teaches writing in the English language at a college in the United States of America is a representative of who they are. People like me are often thought of as "international" and found at the margins of our discipline despite the good intentions of those who manage that space. We are the "missing people" that the feminist continental philosopher Rosi Braidotti refers to. We are those whose epistemological and literacy practices are measured by western standards and not standards of our own. We are those defined rather than definers. So, now that we know who we are, we can talk about where we are/have been. In short, I believe that we are in a defining moment where definitive programs continue to define for us who we are and what we can be or ought to be.
When I say we are in a defining moment, I am claiming that the discourses around the proliferation and use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies in writing are shaping, to some extent, how we define writing and who a writer is. As is exemplified by the numerous statements on AI writing tools that our discipline's associations and gatekeepers have produced (see the position statements of AWAC and MLA-CCCC for examples), we are grappling with the possibility that writing is not a uniquely human activity. Now that these non-humans are generating strings of meaningful texts, do we need to re-think what it means to write? Has writing become an object-oriented activity and not a human-centered one? The AWAC statement is, for example, careful to label what ChatGPT does as text generating and not writing. While I am not sure that AI tools write, the suggestion that they are merely generating texts reminds me of how writing...