This essay by Bruce Robbins has now been published in Critical AI at this link https://doi.org/10.1215/2834703X-12347708; an extract is pasted in below. If your institution lacks access to Critical AI please encourage them to subscribe. If you are an independent scholar please write to criticalai@sas.rutgers.edu.
EXTRACT:
A book is a slow thing. Publishing a book aimed at a fast-moving target such as generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) is a risky enterprise. John Warner, a well-respected newspaper columnist, book reviewer, and writer of books about the teaching of writing, tells us so at the beginning of his charming, lucid, and often persuasive book, and he pitches the book accordingly. He focuses on a general issue unlikely to be affected by any new tricks released into the world by a new version of ChatGPT or some other chatbot. His protest is against the price humanity pays—the price paid in terms of humanity—when an essential human function like writing is outsourced to an automated tool.
As it happens, a new version of ChatGPT is in fact released into the world while Warner is well into the writing. And he is ready for it. In chapter 16, he uses GPT…