The lightning-fast pace of innovation in weak and strong AI, open AI, and natural language processing have jointly given rise to a developing need to reshuffle and refurbish most of our pedagogical and rhetorical practices. The growing use of GPT 3, Chat GPT, LaMDA, DELL E-2, Packback, and other AI-empowered algorithmic tools have pushed the field of rhetoric and composition to transform, giving rise to a grim scenario characterized by pedagogical emasculation, professional anxiety on the part of writing instructors and researchers in rhetoric and composition. In the event of AI’s pervasive applications in pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing studies, a new analytical, evaluative, and critical foray into hitherto practiced pedagogical norms, rhetorical praxes, research strategies, and habits of mind needs to be revisited to prepare the emerging and established writing teachers to face the music of artificial intelligence’s ignited and intrusive intervention in the field of teaching writing.

The sole and whole significance of this session resides in the fact that writing studies, rhetoric, and composition are increasingly affected by the growing uses of AI. Open AI, Google’s DeepMind, Meta’s AI, and plenty of AI-developing tech giants have developed cutting-edge AI-empowered and Algorithm-driven tools and software that enable text generation at the touch of a button. Its flipside cannot be ignored. The ensuing repercussions of AI’s cooptation in writing studies, pedagogies, and rhetoric span from ethical problematics and linguistic injustice to pedagogical emasculation, professional precarity, automation-triggered monotony, and racial entanglement. The AI’s triumphant march into the pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing studies market has undoubtedly given a jolt to an erstwhile perspective, making a clarion call to admit the coexistence between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. What sort of perspective would sound relevant instead of welcoming AI uncritically in our composing behaviors and approaches, apart from rejecting a fresh fruit of comfort and convenience AI brings? How to tap the vast possibilities of maneuvering our pedagogies, rhetorical practices, and blueprints of writing studies? How to come to terms with the pros and cons of AI’s august advent, endless aggrandizement, and continuous acceleration? Any attempt to explore cogent and convincing answers to these questions leads to the construction of a shifting perspective on the totality of our pedagogical and rhetorical norms, discursive denominator, and disciplinary bastion of writing studies. A shifting perspective is dangling here in rhetoric and composition, following the pervasive application of AI.

250-300 words of abstracts are invited for this session. 

https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18734