| _version_ | 1866902269366108160 |
|---|---|
| author | Gyawali, Sandip |
| author_facet | Gyawali, Sandip |
| contents | <p>Generative AI tools are increasingly shaping how knowledge is synthesized and circulated. Due to this, questions of authorship, ownership, and rhetorical agency have become urgent within First-Year English Composition. Google’s ranking models and AI Overview, Microsoft Edge’s Copilot, and other machine-driven systems are now in the position of controlling writing digitally and deciding who benefits from it. As Douglas Hesse has long examined the ownership of writing, these computational infrastructures mediate these questions at a scale and speed that surpass traditional literacy frameworks. This paper argues that new writers consume information that is already pre-processed, evaluated, and hierarchized by these systems, creating a feedback loop. Then they reproduce writing that conforms to the same machine-optimized patterns. This recursive cycle produces what Alford terms algorithmic adoxa—claims and syntheses that appear authoritative because they are computationally ranked yet remain unexamined, non-contextual, and often detached from human experience.</p> <p>Drawing from Alford’s work on Doxa After Digitality, this essay tries to establish that search engines do more than index information—they actively construct publicly accepted beliefs (doxa) for novice writers. Google’s documentation on automatically ranking results demonstrates how the search engine synthesizes and prioritizes content before anyone ever encounters it. As a result, FYE students engage not with primary texts but with derivative, system-generated interpretations that subtly shape their assumptions about evidence, authority, and rhetorical purpose.</p> <p>As James Berlin stated, Current-Traditional Rhetoric held the value that form expresses preexisting substance, which is now reversed. In today’s data-driven environment, form becomes substance, and the patterns favored by ranking models determine which ideas become visible or writable. FYE pedagogy must move beyond policing logic of AI detection and plagiarism surveillance. Instead, instructors should adapt to a form of computational literacy to help students understand how these digital logics structure the knowledge they encounter and the writing they produce. There should be a reorientation of FYE Composition toward practices that preserve rhetorical agency when computational systems increasingly determine how students write and what they believe they know.</p> |
| format | Recurso digital |
| id | zenodo_https___doi_org_10_5281_zenodo_19655794 |
| institution | Zenodo |
| language | |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| publisher | Zenodo |
| record_format | zenodo |
| spellingShingle | Algorithmic Adoxa: Authorship in the Age of AI Gyawali, Sandip <p>Generative AI tools are increasingly shaping how knowledge is synthesized and circulated. Due to this, questions of authorship, ownership, and rhetorical agency have become urgent within First-Year English Composition. Google’s ranking models and AI Overview, Microsoft Edge’s Copilot, and other machine-driven systems are now in the position of controlling writing digitally and deciding who benefits from it. As Douglas Hesse has long examined the ownership of writing, these computational infrastructures mediate these questions at a scale and speed that surpass traditional literacy frameworks. This paper argues that new writers consume information that is already pre-processed, evaluated, and hierarchized by these systems, creating a feedback loop. Then they reproduce writing that conforms to the same machine-optimized patterns. This recursive cycle produces what Alford terms algorithmic adoxa—claims and syntheses that appear authoritative because they are computationally ranked yet remain unexamined, non-contextual, and often detached from human experience.</p> <p>Drawing from Alford’s work on Doxa After Digitality, this essay tries to establish that search engines do more than index information—they actively construct publicly accepted beliefs (doxa) for novice writers. Google’s documentation on automatically ranking results demonstrates how the search engine synthesizes and prioritizes content before anyone ever encounters it. As a result, FYE students engage not with primary texts but with derivative, system-generated interpretations that subtly shape their assumptions about evidence, authority, and rhetorical purpose.</p> <p>As James Berlin stated, Current-Traditional Rhetoric held the value that form expresses preexisting substance, which is now reversed. In today’s data-driven environment, form becomes substance, and the patterns favored by ranking models determine which ideas become visible or writable. FYE pedagogy must move beyond policing logic of AI detection and plagiarism surveillance. Instead, instructors should adapt to a form of computational literacy to help students understand how these digital logics structure the knowledge they encounter and the writing they produce. There should be a reorientation of FYE Composition toward practices that preserve rhetorical agency when computational systems increasingly determine how students write and what they believe they know.</p> |
| title | Algorithmic Adoxa: Authorship in the Age of AI |
| url | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19655794 |