Department of Management seminar Writing against AI: Reconnecting with the practice of human reading-writing - With Professor Emma Bell

Management research is at a turning point as business school scholars discuss the impact of generative artificial intelligence on knowledge production. Some argue that AI can make the process of doing research and writing research papers quicker and more efficient. While this promise holds sway for academics who are under fierce pressure to produce publications, in this essay we argue that there is an urgent need to collectively consider what AI means for the future of academic writing in business schools. We write against AI because we are concerned that it moves us further towards an instrumentalist and formulaic orientation to writing that is at odds with our responsibilities as writers. To counter this, we seek to recognize and defend what is distinctive and important about non-essentialist and diverse forms of human writing, the value and purpose of which stems from a capacity to affect and be affected. We offer arguments for embodied and political writing through the notion of human reading-writing. We conclude by calling for collective and individual agency in responding to AI in ways which divert us from being overwhelmed by a flood of endlessly derivative academic slop and reconnect us to our responsibilities as human writers.