The text is not the product

"Academics, especially in the humanities, produce texts, and they teach students to produce text. This is a standard assumption, often taken for granted, and maybe not too surprising in times in which productivity is a supreme social norm. Think of the relief - by students and faculty alike - when a text has been submitted before the deadline. Think of all the praise for writers and texts that goes around in our fields ("prolific," "rigorous," "accessible," ...). Think of the proud social media posts with a pile of books fresh off the press (I've been guilty of that myself)."

"Generative AI, for all its problems, has one virtue: it forces us to rethink that assumption. The ease with which AI can spit out seemingly coherent text, or help rewrite a few convoluted sentences into elegant prose, has been perceived by some academics as a threat to the very meaning of our professional existence. "I feel like one of those coal miners must have felt when it was already clear that the mines would be closed soon," a colleague recently said to me."

"I want to resist this idea - maybe out of a desperate desire to cling to my professional identity, but with what I have come to think of as an important distinction: texts as products, or texts as means to something very different. There may be situations in which texts are really products in and of themselves. I wanted to provide examples (certain types of cheap fiction writing? user manuals? the small print in contracts?), but the longer I think about it, the harder I find it to come up with examples that would really fit."

"We treat texts as products; they get bought and sold (think of everything around copy right and IP). But in reality, texts are almost always something else. Here is an incomplete list of what texts can be: a means for communicating certain facts or ideas, a means for communicating that one knows certain facts or ideas, a means for helping others solve problems, a means fo"

Academics in the humanities commonly assume that producing texts is central to professional work and student training. Generative AI makes it easy to generate or polish seemingly coherent prose, which some academics view as a threat to the meaning of their work. A different distinction is proposed: texts should be understood less as products and more as means to other ends. Some texts can function as products, but many academic texts primarily communicate facts and ideas, demonstrate knowledge, help others solve problems, and support further learning and action. This framing reframes AI’s role as changing how text is produced rather than eliminating the underlying purposes texts serve.

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