Searching for the Right Metaphors to Understand and Interrogate the AI Age

The invention of the printing press allowed the rapid dissemination of science, culture, and knowledge that many refer to as the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, or the Scientific Revolution (Dewar, 1998; Kissinger, Schmidt, & Huttenlocher, 2023). Many scholars and experts believe AI will be as transformative as the printing press and usher in unprecedented growth in knowledge and human potential (Ball, 2023; Kissinger et al., 2023; Sforza, 2023). Of course we can’t yet know whether AI will be as transformational as the printing press, but this comparison invoked by thought leaders reveals the human impulse to use metaphors to make sense of an unpredictable future. My sense is that we are entering a new era of knowledge production that will profoundly impact civilization. We see glimpses everywhere of the potential of AI. Business professionals are rapidly adopting these tools to create content and communicate. The major software vendors are integrating AI into personal productivity software. More than any other reason, I believe we are entering a new era because AI is now available for any person to use in novel ways. People need no technical skills. They can use natural language to engage AI applications to imagine and create. I’ll refer to this new era as the AI Age. Business communication scholars and instructors are uniquely positioned to provide guidance in the AI Age. The rapid adoption of AI tools in the past year is largely to support communication tasks, which I’ll refer to as AI-mediated communication (AI-MC) (Hancock, Naaman, & Levy, 2020). Business practitioners engage in the following AI-MC activities: researching ideas, drafting emails and reports, creating images for logos and business plans, creating social media posts, revising text in communications, and other similar applications. While business communication scholars have increasingly explored the impact of AI on business communication in the past five years (e.g., Getchell et al., 2022; Lee, 2020; Son, Lee, & Chang, 2019), this moment is unique: only in the past year have nearly all business professionals had easy access to generative AI. We are entering unchartered terrain. In early 2023, several colleagues and I surveyed around 340 business communication instructors about AI and writing instruction. Business communication instructors are uniquely qualified to evaluate how new technologies influence communication. Many experts and software vendors tend to emphasize the technical side of new technologies, whereas these instructors were able to identify the profound influences AI may have on human relationships, capabilities, and autonomy. Instructors in this project specifically commented on the challenges and opportunities associated with AI-assisted writing. They collectively suggested that AI literacy requires competencies in application, authenticity, accountability, and agency (Cardon, Fleischmann, Aritz, Logemann, & Heidewald, 2023a). Interestingly, business communication instructors in our study sought to make sense of generative AI in terms of metaphors. They referred to AI as similar to various tools, applications, and services, such as a calculator, Wikipedia, a computer, Received: Jul 10, 2023 Accepted: Jul 26, 2023 Corresponding author: Peter Cardon Department of Business Communication, Marshall School of Business University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA Tel: +1-213-740-0133, E-mail: cardon@marshall.usc.edu