Weathering the Rhetorical Climates of AI

Dados Bibliográficos

ID21307810
AutoresDustin Edwards (0000-0001-6409-8041, autor correspondente)
Ano2025
Volume77
Fascículo1
Páginas13-38
Data de publicação2025-09-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCollege Composition and Communication (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0010-096X • E-ISSN: 1939-9006
EditoraNational Council of Teachers of English (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.58680/ccc202577113
OpenAlexW7116118005
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas19

In a relatively short time, market and political forces have intensified the reach of artificial intelligence (AI). AI has become, in a word, climatic—not only a discrete technological system but also a creeping assemblage of ideological, material, and political forces. This article tracks these forces by developing rhetorical climates of AI as a conceptual framework. In doing so, I aim to (1) link the harms of climate change with the rapid buildout of AI infrastructure and (2) shift the frame of the conversation by emphasizing the extractive, exploitative, enclosed, and knotted supremacist conditions that have been prerequisites for building AI systems at scale. While these pervading rhetorical climates may seem unchangeable, I track how microclimates of resistance have developed, in the past and in the present. In particular, I emphasize the importance of bodily intelligence in navigating asymmetrical conditions of power felt in the AI industry. The article concludes by discussing how rhetoric and writing studies can weather the unfolding rhetorical climates of AI by diagnosing conditions, seizing moments, and plotting futures to imagine a less extractive and less harmful world

Conversation · Frame (networking) · Futures contract · Politics · Power (physics) · Resistance (ecology) · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Digital Education and Society · Ethics and Social Impacts of AI · Rhetoric and Communication Studies