The AI Turn, English Studies, and Enduring Values

It's time for another turn.This turn, the "AI Turn," is more than simply the arrival of new technologies or the sudden acceleration of access to powerful tools -it is a complete paradigm shift, one that asks us to reconsider concepts that sit at the very heart of our disciplines: originality, authorship, creativity, literacy, imagination, composition.Nothing about this turn is minor.These concerns are at the heart of what it means to teach, to write, to understand what it means to be human.English studies is of course used to such turns.The social turn, the cultural turn, the digital turn -each brought us new questions, new answers, and new pedagogies.And yet, something about this turn feels decidedly different.Something about this turn feels world-changing in a Gutenberg-esque way.For it arrives not only with new concerns, new technologies, and new approaches to teaching and learning but also with a fundamental shift in what it means to produce and interpret text.Generative AI produces writing in ways that are increasingly so human that it begs the question of what role actual humans have in composition.Because these questions are so central to humanistic inquiry, it's no surprise that the rise of generative AI has sparked (to put it mildly) unease.At times, it can feel like these systems are encroaching on activities we have long considered distinctively human; at times, it can also feel like these systems are