The Politics of Prompt Engineering

Considerations about teaching prompt engineering in writing courses rarely examine the political ideology underlying the concept. Prompt engineering reflects a deep-rooted belief in writing as a task of refining and transmitting information and sees the human, for this process, as an imperfect conduit that should be replaced with something more optimized. Focusing on prompt engineering reflects a cyberlibertarian desire to push the human further and further to the periphery in the pursuit of perfectly refined “information.” If students are to learn about prompt engineering, it should be with the goal of dismantling that narrow view of writing, not perpetuating it.