Writing with Robots and other Curiosities of the Age of Machine Rhetorics

摘要

This chapter explores the unevenly distributed circumstances of "assistive writing technologies"—commonly known as 'bots—that are increasingly incorporated into the writing process. It addresses two important sets of questions for teachers and researchers of writing in the age of machine rhetoric. Since the late 1970s, rhetoric and writing studies has taken artificial intelligence and its influence on human rhetorical activity seriously, but only occasionally. The Faciloscope works similarly to the Hedge-o-Matic in that takes plain text input and performs a kind of rhetorical analysis. Sometimes the facilitators monitor many threads at once—in social media and blogging spaces for instance—and the Faciloscope helps the moderators to see facilitation moves happening in the thread. Michael Wojcik suggested that people might conceive of a computational approach to rhetoric by thinking about various kinds of scholarship and projects that exist along four axes.