Remixing the Internet and AI

If you’re somehow reading this page, that means you discovered the digital writing site! Welcome! This site is tied to a college level writing class titled, as you can presume, Digital Writing. Over the next 12 weeks, my peers and I will be updating this site weekly with insights as to what texts we read this week to prepare for class, as well as updates as to what new applications and programs we’re using. You will be getting insight into what we read this week and how that informs my opinions and thoughts surrounding the topic of digital writing.

First, we’re going to talk about Markdown. It can briefly be summarized as writing conventions that allow what you write to be translated to almost any webpage, PDF, or whatever. It’s very helpful, and I’m certainly going to keep using it in the future. I’m exhausted with how often I have to redo formatting between different writing programs, like Google Docs or LibreOffice.

Markdown is an interesting format guide. It reminds me a lot of the ‘old internet,’ of simpler websites circa 2005. It felt like that anybody could get a website domain and play with it however they wanted. The internet felt like a very individualized place. Whenever I read one of those home-made websites, I knew that I was communicating with another person. Even the remixing of other people’s work seemed unique to me.

Oh, how time steadily changes things. Even before the advent of AI, the internet and websites in general began to feel commercialized. It was so subtle that I didn’t notice it until my sister had pointed it out several years ago in the context of webcomics. They used to be so delightfully unique, each with their own domain and personalized website.

It feels like the internet has gotten smaller, if that makes any sense, and it definitely feels more compacted. I blame AI for the crunching that it seems to have experienced in the past year or so. Proponents of AI would argue this point with me perhaps, but I’m not sure they have too much of a leg to stand on.

Bear with me here, dear readers. I’m about to get into the theory of rhetoric, which, coincidentally, was our major topic for the week.

Ridolfo and DeVoss in “Composing for Recomposition” discussed how rhetoric has changed and how people have altered how they post information on the internet. They define something called rhetorical velocity, which they describe as “a strategic approach to composing for rhetorical delivery.” This, as they go on to explain, essentially means that people are now posting their work on the internet with the idea that it will have an immediate wide-spread, and that it could be taken to be remade and recomposed into something else.

I think this rhetorical theory is fine and correct. I have no qualms with Ridolfo and DeVoss’s work. I will say that the idea that everything posted on the internet is presumed to be fair game to be remixed is a cornerstone of how AI models were made. It remixes what people have made without giving credit or acknowledging where it’s from. I doubt Ridolfo or DeVoss envisioned this in the year 2009.

Some, like Lance Cummings in his article “Introduction to Machine Rhetorics,” have strong faith in AI. In his own words, “The way we write, teach, and create content is rapidly changing…not because AI is taking over our jobs, but because our available means of persuasion is widening.” I see where he’s coming from. AI is a tool, one with ethically dubious to bad origins. Do we not use rhetoric when we have to ‘talk’ to the AI to get it to do what we want?

I will argue here that AI is crunching the internet together and making everything homogeneous. The internet has thrived off of remix and recontextualization since its origins. It just seems to me that there’s a lot of garbage out now, and a lot of it AI generated. Perhaps the idea of rhetorical recomposition created a system of thought, that anything posted on the internet is fair game to be recompiled. I’m not necessarily sure it should be, and certainly not in the way that AI is doing so.