October’s first issue of the New Yorker includes an article exploring what it’s like to compose with GenAI. While I wasn’t surprised to find this topic in the pages of the New Yorker, I couldn’t believe that author Cal Newport draws on ideas and voices from the journal Computers and Composition, a journal that heavily influences my own research and perspectives on writing, technology, and pedagogy. The journal’s 71st volume, published in March of 2024, explores questions about how we should make sense of the role that GenAI plays in the composing process. From this volume, the New Yorker article highlights a study by Stacey Pigg, one of my favorite researchers, in which she analyzes videos of students using GenAI to write research papers. In this way, the article begins to identify and codify more precisely how writers use GenAI to write.

As someone with an interest in academic research on composing technologies, the article was initially interesting to me because of the unexpected appearance of one of my favorite academic journals in one of my favorite periodicals. However, I was quickly drawn to Newport’s response to the titular question “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT” as it mirrors what my students and I are finding about this technology. Newport draws similar conclusions to those of former UAB student Haley Wells, who finds that using ChatGPT does not lead to a reduction in time spent but to a boost in support when her brain feels tired at the end of a long day. Newport writes that by using ChatGPT while writing the article:

Newport ends his article with another reference to a Computers and Composition contributor, Alan M. Knowles, who suggests that we might consider using GenAI to write as “rhetorical load sharing.” Without losing what we value in the struggle of writing, perhaps we can embrace a tool that makes the difficult act of writing a little more inviting.