Future Talk: Imagining and (Mis)Using Artificial Intelligence in Human Communication

Abstract

This project explores how the rhetoric surrounding artificial intelligence envisions human communication practices as benefitting from emergent AI technologies. As part of a larger sociotechnical imaginary, individual users, tech companies, and public thinkers produce texts making claims or speculating about the potential of AI that is supposed to enhance or participate in human communication. This dissertation traces these discourses across three case studies involving recent developments in artificial intelligence designed for communication. An AI-powered public speaking app, a robot that teaches emotional communication skills to children, and public responses to the rise of generative AI are put forth as specific instances that offer a glimpse into how AI is increasingly imagined as suitable for communication labor. Through a rhetorical analysis, I investigate how these recent technologies are imagined as intelligent communicators and distinctly machinic entities, rather than mere mimicries of human beings. In the process, I argue, these ideas of what AI could do for human communication also shape societal ideals of useful communication. The assertion that some communication is useful also implies that some forms of communication are useless. While AI may be a relatively new invention, this project examines how these underlying values of usefulness and attitudes towards communication labor rearticulate a long history of normative communication ideals.