Week 2

Liam Justiniano

Artificial Intelligence seems to have taken over any conversation I have in my college experience. There’s always something new each week or I personally discover a new sphere AI has invaded, it’s intimidating. The conversations often make me feel discouraged. There is so much changing constantly and while I might’ve generally thought that as an exciting challenge, I can’t seem to keep up with how much AI has evolved but what’s more shocking to me is how quickly people are adapting to AI. Just like AI has pervaded conversations, it’s just everywhere I go online. There is no escape, even as I draft this in GoogleDocs I am haunted by the Google Gemini logo in the corner. It spins and whirls and sparkles when you run your mouse over it– trying to lure you in. 

In reading Mile Klee’s Rolling Stones Article, I discovered just how embedded in the academic world AI has become. AI is creating fake articles, some of which even tries to parrot real patterns and research topics from real life authors, or just generating fake articles and authors from the void. 

AI is changing the way everyone works. Not only do you have to check the validity of your source. You have to check their sources and even a step further to ensure that there’s real articles and real research behind them, but how far back can we possibly go? One AI article that gets circulated is essentially poison in the well polluting the validity of all the papers that circulate around it. 

Where does it start and when is this possibly going to end? The answers I’ve drawn don’t come out entirely optimistic. 

However, with all that’s changing in reading, “COMPOSING FOR RECOMPOSITION: RHETORICAL VELOCITY AND DELIVERY” by  Jim Ridolfo and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, it was refreshing to see and reflect about what is sticking around when it comes to rhetoric. Delivery is still extremely important, even though how rhetoric circulates has still changed. I’m not sure Aristotle could have ever predicted the corruptive powers of Twitter or Reddit. 

I particularly liked the story about Katie, a student activist. She had a poem she wanted to widely circulate. She needed to consider how she delivered her poem in relation to how she wanted it to be received. She had to ask how she needed to deliver her poem in relation to the objective of her poem. She decided that hand-delivery was the most impactful or effective way to reach her objective.

There was something about that exclusively human interaction that really just felt refreshing.

While it seems like AI is having a very negative impact on about everything, I guess at the very least, it’s setting up a gray and lifeless background for real human interaction and real human creativity to shine.