There’s a disturbing lack of rhetorical principles being applied to AI when they have been applied to a number of less-obvious targets like science, medicine, urban cityscapes, video games, disability signs in public places, mothering at academic conferences, air travel, grocery store aisles and so on. Maybe it’s just that AI is new, or maybe we aren’t sure how to write about it.
It’s becoming clear to me that the decline (not death) of debate is going to have a third act like the million dollar man - “We can build him back better than he was” so goes the show’s opening line. The rhetoric of AI and AI’s rhetoric and the rhetorical implications of AI in our daily life needs a lot more publications about it. I would like to contribute if I can, but when I sit down to write about it what can I say? It seems I don’t know enough.
Then I read this great essay in Time magazine (it’s always telling me about responsibility!). I think this writer gets how to rhetorically talk about AI and digital data in a rhetorical way that scholars haven’t caught up to yet. Or perhaps scholars are less interested in talking to their students and the public about these issues (very likely). I mean, why write about something if it can’t be in a paywalled boring academic journal that most people can’t read or can’t find.
Anyway the best part of this essay is the comparative aspects. The argument is very powerful about how something becomes policy through advocacy and then becomes an everyday way of speaking, and then an everyday way of speaking. I think this is a great start to a rhetorical theory of kindness!
See what you think: https://time.com/7273469/data-monitoring-kindness-essay/