Title: Dreaming Writing: Six Fantasies of Generative AI

Name of presenter: Dr Tom Muir

Affiliation and academic title: Associate Professor of English for Academic Purposes, OsloMet – Oslo Metropolitan University

Email address: tmuir@oslomet.no

​

Keywords: Gen AI; dreams; history of writing; the occult; the Reformation in Europe; textual editing

​

Abstract:

The techbros tell a single story about Gen AI: it is the most important technology in the history of technology – it is pivotal in all knowledge domains – one day we will wonder how we managed without it. Sam Altman last year claimed that humans would never be able to outcompete ChatGPT in terms of intellectual “horsepower” so the future of human endeavour would now be all about learning how best to use the new power in our midst.

 

One way of retaining the human factor in our academic work is to recognize that this story is not the only one we can tell about Gen AI – that this Gen AI moment is part of other histories too. Recognising the different histories passing through this moment is a way of preserving that human factor, and retaining some of the power that threatens to ebb away from us. One such story depicts the arrival of Gen AI as part of the ongoing history of the digitization of writing, for example: part of a story that began with word processing technology.

 

But other stories yield even greater power – for teachers of writing and academic communication, and for our students. We could recognize that the history of writing is also the history of fantasies about writing. And that would permit us to see the arrival of Gen AI as the latest instalment in the history of, for example, automatic writing – the fantasy that a non-human agent, typically a spirit persisting after life, might animate a body or object and magically cause text to appear.

 

This conceptual paper, by tracking this and other fantasies of writing to the present, aims to provide a new context and a new history for talking about Gen AI, and an escape, therefore, from the sweaty hype of much of the current AI discourse.