The Human Curator: AI and the Future of Writing

Abstract

While academics in the humanities and social scientists tend to be political progressives, they often behave more like reactionaries when it comes to technological innovation. Some of our professional furor against ChatGPT and other AI chatbots is certainly by the ease of plagiarism it enables, though presumably a consensus solution will eventually emerge for this problem. Yet the real anger directed at this technology apparently stems from a misplaced pre-emptive nostalgia about the role of the writer. We mourn in advance the solitary author summoning words onto blank paper ex nihilo, ignoring that the essential feature of writers lies elsewhere.