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REGINA RINI

WHAT SOCRATES DIDN’T WRITE

Socrates never wrote anything; he thought the technology of writing was dangerous for the self and the social fabric. That curmudgeonly stance has lately made Socrates a character in public debates about artificial intelligence (AI). Here I return to the source, unpacking what bothered Socrates about writing and whether it really does tell us anything about our technological moment. Socrates’s arguments are more complex than you might think—it is not all about the purported link between writing and forgetfulness. What we should take from Socrates is a template for anticipating the epistemic effects of technological disruption.

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MATTHEW KIRSCHENBAUM

THE WRITING LESSON REVISITED: AI [AND | IN | IS] THE SCRIPTURAL ECONOMY

This essay uses Michel de Certeau’s framing of modernity as a scriptural economy—and that concept’s parafictional deployment in Tom McCarthy’s 2015 novel Satin Island and the novel’s debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous chapter “A Writing Lesson”—to situate large language models (LLMs) in a tradition of writing and textual production rooted in capitalism and transactional practices. It argues that generative artificial intelligence should be understood not as the disruption of writing or an aberration but as the completion of the structural logic of the scriptural economy and that LLMs are very likely the final word on a system of production wherein writing is tokenized and transacted for extraction of value in ways that render the technology’s current limitations, such as a propensity for hallucinations, largely beside the point. Lest there be any misunderstanding, this is not intended as a salutary diagnosis.

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JOHN CAYLEY

WRITING IMPLEMENTS

The archive and the tools with which we now write have definitively changed, particularly since the advent of large language models. Writing with computation now entails something beyond word processing or developing human-authored algorithms to produce otherwise intentional compositions. Since at least the beginning of the twenty-first century, writing has been changed more by the way authors relate to the archive than by direct computational intervention. We are closer to the database than to our libraries. The archive reaches us in a new form with large language models as its ultimate implementation. How writers relate to the archive is crucial. Transactions may be implementational or existential—the former, inevitable and potentially generative; the latter, profoundly misdirected.

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JEFF DOLVEN

THE END OF THE SENTENCE

Have we come to the end of the sentence? This essay assesses the role of sentences in the default styles of the chatbots and takes occasion to consider its historical affordances as a form of exteriorization—one that coordinates linguistic elements and bounds revision. Tracing writing from its non-sentential origins through early modern grammatical theory makes clear that sentences are not the fundamental unit of writing but a culturally emergent compromise between temporal sequence and conceptual simultaneity. Attention to handwriting, word processing, and interactions with large language models shows how vertical layout, modularity, and symbolic substitution interact with sentence-centered prose. Speaking back on behalf of the sentence are Renee Gladman’s prose architectures, city-sentences that offer an image of sentence-thinking as a form of life.

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DANIEL ANDERSON AND MATTHEW DUNCAN

PROSUMER APPROACHES TO AI: TECHNO-SOCIAL MOMENTS AND A MODEL FOR LITERACY

Looking at historical moments reveals key concerns for the relationships between thinking, writing, and technology. In the 1990s, hypertext writing tools reshaped the links between writing and thinking and shifted understandings of agency. In the 2000s, technical developments created new affordances for composing with video, adding to consumer and producer cameras a new device category: the prosumer. The blurring of consumer and producer offers a valuable lens for understanding our current moment with artificial intelligence (AI). Early responses to AI focused on how writing might be used to produce knowledge through the act of prompting. Current developments are marked by the emergence of prosumer tools for AI. These technologies call for extending AI literacy to include knowledge of the customization and system creation possibilities of these low-threshold tools. This approach translates into a model of prosumer AI literacy.

 

 

TAHNEER OKSMAN

WRITING, AND READING, WITH JUDGMENT: VAUHINI VARA’S “GHOSTS,” GPT-3, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EXPRESSIONS OF EVERYDAY GRIEF

When Vauhini Vara’s 2021 personal essay about her grief, “Ghosts,” written in conjunction with GPT-3, was published, proponents of the technology identified it as proof of the technology’s creative capacities. This article takes a close look at Vara’s popular essay to dispute such claims. Further, I read Vara’s work for what it exposes about the tensions between specificity and convention that emerge in human-authored autobiographical writing, particularly but not only when it comes to loss and grief. What Vara’s turn to generative artificial intelligence ultimately discloses is how personal expressions of grief emerge in and through the real and imagined communities that produce and shape them.

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NANCY K. MILLER

OLD WRITING

In this essay I consider the effects of contemporary technological developments on writing. Have digital innovations infiltrated literary genres and critical styles? With these questions in mind, I focus on what autobiographical projects and millennial fiction may tell us about twenty-first-century aesthetics through a mini case study of Molly Jong-Fast’s 2025 memoir How to Lose Your Mother and her mother Erica Jong’s 1973 best-selling novel Fear of Flying (reissued, most recently, in 2023). Throughout the essay I query the role played by age in the production and reception of writing across genres in our relentlessly digital era.

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OTTO KRUSE

CULTIVATING EPISTEMIC CONSCIOUSNESS: THE FUTURE OF INDEPENDENT AND CRITICAL THINKING IN STUDENT WRITING

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is having a profound impact on key aspects of academic writing and is threatening to disrupt the intellectual development of student writers. This is due to its ability to automate thought processes alongside some enduring epistemological shortcomings. AI circumvents all safeguards of epistemic authority established in academia and challenges the deepest level of epistemology: the definition and justification of truth. This article proposes a framework for considering AI epistemology in relation to human epistemic development. The concept of epistemic literacy is introduced to help us understand these changes and inform twenty-first-century writing pedagogy.

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CHARLES BAZERMAN

CLIMATE CHANGE CHALLENGES EXTENDED SOCIETY AND ITS LITERATE MEDIATION

Writing as an infrastructural social technology has coevolved and interacted with social organization for five millennia. However, climate change is disrupting our intertwined socio-communicative systems, starting with the textual means of identifying scientific authority and making it relevant to government policy. Other textually mediated social systems are being disrupted by the material consequences of climate change and the fracturing of knowledge systems, including systems seemingly distant from climate change. Some of the disruptive pressures may be integrated into current arrangements, but others may instigate more fundamental social changes and newer forms of communicative mediation. Observing and understanding textual changes can help us innovate socio-communicative systems for our changing world.