In my Digital Writing Class, we are talking about digital writing and how to successfully write and publish digitally. Our initial topics have been AI, Recomposition (remixing), and a markup language called markdown. I am going to go over my notes and highlight what I enjoyed from those topics here.
AI
Our discussion of AI was lead by Introduction to Machine Rhetorics, an article written by Lance Cummings, and it covered the idea of how we can communicate with AI to work WITH it effectively. He talks about how we can communicate, shape, and manipulate AI to get what we want. Some forms of this are data curation, knowledge graphs, and fine-tuning. One quote from the fine-tuning section that I appreciated was, “By training a model on company-specific documentation and style guides, we’re essentially teaching it to adapt its “speech” to a particular context and audience, just as a classical orator would” (Cummings). Being able to tailor a model on company specific-styles unlocks the potential for very precise work to be done, very quickly, and very often. I can see customer service benefitting greatly with AI being able to operate 24/7. Instead of that universal customer service voice, it could end up being a very human and very environment influenced customer service experience.
Remixing
We also read “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery” by Jim Ridolfo and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss. This talked about remixing and how, as authors, we can create our works with the thought in mind others might take our piece and rework it. If we do our job correctly, we want to make it as easy or hard to recompose our work as possible. My favorite quote from Ridolfo and DeVoss is, “Writers engage in taking the old and making new. Appropriating words and images. Taking pieces, splicing ideas, compiling fragments. Transforming existing work.” The reason I enjoyed this quote so much is because I was reading Metamorphoses by Ovid. If you don’t know, metamorphoses is the Greek translation for “transformations”, the theme which runs through the whole book and all the stories. The idea of change. Here, we see it as the soul of remixing, taking the old and giving it new life.
Markdown
The final topic we discussed was a this markup language called Markdown. Essentially, it is a different way to write digitally. Instead of seeing the way your letters look, you use different symbol-based tools to tell your document what to display when it is ran. We used a program that shows a side-by-side view of what your document will display which was nice for learning how to type in it. I enjoy how universal it is, but I did use HTML to edit this document and attach the links seen above. I enjoy learning new things and will have to use Markdown more to have a confirmed opinion on it.
Comments
2 responses to “Week 2 – AI, Remixing, and Markdown”
It is interesting to think about how we manipulated AI and that we’re the ones teaching it. Even though this thing is evolving it still needs a human’s touch in a way. We mold it into what we need for a purpose. The quote you picked definitely fit with your thoughts on AI benefiting the customer service industry, how an orator is teaching this AI speech skills. I, on the other hand, am not sure how to feel about the AI operating customer service. While it could be trained for such a job, there is always unpredictability for what someone may need. I did like your inclusion of the quote “Writers engage in taking the old and making new. Appropriating words and images. Taking pieces, splicing ideas, compiling fragments. Transforming existing work.” It does make remixing seem more negative, even though it does have the potential to be positive, in my opinion. Good Post!
I really liked your point on the remixing. I thought that was such a cool connection with that book. While I haven’t read it, it seems quite intriguing and really hits that home run narrative that Ridolfo and DeVoss are aiming for. The idea behind Ai being a customer service was a really intricate idea. I think there is a level to AI that we need to consider and be okay with not expanding upon, and I think your words did a great example of that, rather than improving AI’s capabilities to a ridiculous stature, expand it among the population.