While marketing from the AI companies vying for market share would have users believe that text-producing machines arrived ex nihilo, natural language generation represents an updated form of an ancient practice: ghostwriting. Debates about the ethics of this practice span millennia, but I want to focus on an argument between communications professors Ernest Bormann and Donald Smith from the 1961 issue of The Quarterly Journal of Speech about the ethics of ghostwriting. In what feels like a prescient anticipation of LLMs, they focus on the ability to believe the listed author was the originator of the idea as well as…
Author: Charles Grimm
Charles Grimm
Two-year college professor and advocate for access-oriented institutions who reluctantly wrote a dissertation on ghostwriting when despairing of finding a job in Academia, but you might know me because I answered your dissertation survey and/or request for interviews.
Speakers: Jennifer Baine (South Arkansas Community College, El Dorado), Jennifer Burke Reifman (University of California, Davis), and Thomas Geary (Tidewater Community College, Virginia Beach, VA) Presenters in this panel all focused on the ways that technology offers teachers chances to take into account the humanity of their students, open up further access to composition, and provide increased reflection on writing as process. While each speaker engaged in various levels of technology use in the session, each spoke of benefits of technology specific to our two-year colleges that much of the research has ignored by focusing exclusively on four-year colleges and…
After returning to formal studies of writing after several years away, I realized that bots have begun to do a lot of on-the-ground writing work. While SmarterChild on AIM was fun to interact with way back in my early online life, my recent work as a content writer for a tech company informed me that bots are being used for a wide range of tasks, such as generating social media posts and automating messages to create sales contacts with minimal human effort. My hiring manager showed me several high-powered bots, but I took note of the free service dlvr.it, one…