When we first circulated the call for “[blank]-in-the-loop writing,” we were motivated by a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, belongs in the loop? The question emerged from ongoing, often polemic, conversations about generative AI and writing, but it was never intended to be limited to AI itself. Inspired by Alan Knowles’s work on rhetorical load sharing and by the increasingly complex ecologies in which contemporary writing unfolds, we invited contributors to explore the people, technologies, values, infrastructures, practices and possibilities that shape writing processes. Intuitively and empirically, we believed loops were refreshingly variable, idiosyncratic, and somehow also familiar. We hoped contributors would help us think beyond machine-in-the-loop models and toward a broader understanding of how writing is distributed, negotiated, constrained and transformed across contexts.
What emerged from the fourteen contributions collected here is a strikingly expansive response to that invitation. Rather than treating the loop as a stable workflow linking human writers and AI, contributors repeatedly complicate, stretch, and reimagine the concept itself. Across these essays, the loop becomes less a technical configuration than a rhetorical, ethical, pedagogical, and political problem. And writing appears not as a discrete act performed by an autonomous individual but as a dynamic assemblage of relations, infrastructures, judgments, negotiations and obligations. If there is a common thread running through the collection, it is a shared refusal to reduce writing to text production or to imagine technological change—where it intersects with writing—as merely a question of efficiency.
Some contributors focus on the forms of judgment and negotiation that remain indispensable within AI-assisted composing. Liping Yang proposes liminality-in-the-loop as a framework for understanding writing as an ongoing negotiation between human and machine agency, where meaning emanates from recursive cycles of prompting, evaluating, revising, accepting, and refusing. Heather Listhartke likewise argues that expertise remains central to contemporary writing, emphasizing that genre knowledge, contextual awareness, and rhetorical judgment become more, not less, important as AI-generated text becomes increasingly available. Manuel Guillermo Gonzalez Velasco extends this concern by distinguishing between ghostwriter and co-author models of AI use, arguing that pedagogical value depends on making rhetorical labor visible and preserving students’ responsibility for rhetorical decision-making. Salma Kalim, meanwhile, reframes AI-assisted writing through the lens of care, developing pedagogical practices that foreground attentiveness, alignment, and accountability rather than speed and optimization.
Other contributors shift attention toward the relationships that sustain writing. Karla Murphy and Chelsie Schlesinger reflect on colleague-in-the-loop writing. They show collaborative teaching partnerships redistribute rhetorical labor and create new possibilities for pedagogical reflection. Miriam Moore, Lindsey Jones, Theodore Lopata, Sydney Michaud, Anna Rundbaken, and Isaac Vazquez offer perhaps the collection’s most charming intervention through duck-(and human)-in-the-loop writing, using the figure of the rubber duck and the work of writing fellows to remind us that writers often need listeners as much as they need tools. Together, these essays insist that writing remains fundamentally relational, dependent upon forms of dialogue, validation, mentorship and shared inquiry that no technology can fully replace.
A third cluster of contributions bunch together around friction, resistance, and refusal. Shuvro Das argues that moments of breakdown between writers and generative AI systems are not failures but productive sites where cultural assumptions, linguistic norms, and power relations become visible. Joe Torok places accessibility at the center of the conversation and illustrates how debates about resistance and academic freedom can obscure questions of care, disability justice, and institutional responsibility. Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan McIntyre, and Maggie Fernandes make perhaps the collection’s most direct case for refusal itself, asking what happened to a field that once challenged surveillance platforms, paper mills, and educational technologies with greater urgency. In concert, these essays remind us that remaining in the loop also means preserving the capacity to hesitate, question, revise, resist, and refuse.
Several contributors push the discussion beyond individual writers and workflows toward the broader systems within which writing occurs. Morgan Banville examines surveillance-in-the-loop writing, which reveals how students, instructors, institutions, and technology companies become entangled in increasingly pervasive systems of monitoring and behavioral management. Jonathan Adams turns our attention to the loop itself and theorizes loops as operational infrastructures sustained through repetition, maintenance, and habituation. Adam Phillips extends this infrastructural perspective by proposing rhetorical assemblage as an alternative to loop metaphors and argues that writing takes shape through dynamic configurations of human and nonhuman actors rather than stable systems of circulation. Together, these essays encourage us to see writing as a set of infrastructures whose operations often become visible only when they break down.
Questions of authorship, labor, and visibility also recur throughout the collection. Charles Grimm situates contemporary debates about AI within a much longer history of ghostwriting, reminding us that concerns about attribution, authorship, and invisible labor long predate large language models. His historical perspective resonates with several other contributors who ask not simply how rhetorical work is distributed, but whose labor becomes visible, whose labor remains hidden, and who remains accountable for the consequences of that distribution. The collection concludes by widening the frame still further. Michael Salvo and John Sherrill invite us to imagine [utopia]-in-the-loop, arguing that conversations about AI and automation should not be limited to adapting to technological change but should also include imagining alternative futures for labor, education, dignity, and human flourishing. Their contribution serves as a fitting conclusion because it captures a recurring impulse that runs throughout the carnival: the desire not merely to describe existing writing ecologies but to intervene in them.
Collectively, these essays suggest that the most important question facing writing studies today may not be whether humans or machines belong in the loop, but rather what values, relationships, infrastructures, responsibilities, and futures we wish to keep there. The answers offered here are varied and sometimes contradictory, but that diversity is precisely the point. The loop, as these contributors highlight, is neither singular nor settled. It remains elastic, contested, and open to revision. We invite readers to enter these conversations, trace the connections among them, and continue imagining what else might belong in the loop.
