I just encountered this notion via Tusting et al’s Academics Writing and it immediately helped me clarify the sense in which Claude now shows up in my professional lifeworld:
Professional writing practices may be acquired and sustained as much through engaging with “sponsors of literacy”, as through formal training or education. Brandt develops this idea, defining sponsors of literacy as: any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, model, as well as recruit, regulate, supress or withhold literacy – and gain advantage by it in some way. (Brandt, 1998, p. 166) In a higher education context, literacy sponsors include colleagues and mentors who support academics’ writing efforts, as well as publishers, reviewers, and editors who act as gatekeepers.
In contrast I don’t believe copilots could ever be sponsors of literacy. My concern is that panicked commercialisation strategies will lead to conversational agents being fine-tuned to resemblance copilots. Even if I took to them pretty organically for fairly idiosyncratic reasons (intellectual curiosity, being a long-term blogger, being a generalist, intellectual scaffolding about technological reflexivity etc) I’m realising their weird and open-ended character makes them hard to use.
I think Ethan Mollick’s rule of thumb that you need to use a frontier model for at least 10 hours to get any real sense of what it can do is broadly correct. It takes much longer than that to integrate it into your practice. I’m worried that conversational agents in their current form will be engineered out of existence because they’re not a commercially viable product.
Mark Carrigan 