PROMPT AS TEXT: TOWARDS A RHETORIC AND POETICS OF HUMAN–AI CO-COMPOSITION

Abstract

Abstract This article argues that the prompt—the linguistic utterance through which a human initiates and directs a generative AI system—should be understood not merely as a technical input to be optimised, but as an emerging literary-rhetorical text in its own right, and therefore a legitimate and pressing object of humanistic inquiry. Since the early 2020s, prompting has become one of the most frequently performed acts of written composition in ordinary life, yet the vocabulary available to describe it has been supplied almost entirely by computer science and industry discourse, both of which treat the prompt as a lever for extracting reliable machine output rather than as an utterance with its own history, form, and stakes. This article contends that such a vocabulary is radically insufficient, and that the humanities possess the conceptual resources—developed over centuries of thinking about authorship, address, genre, and interpretation—to theorise prompting with a precision that purely instrumental accounts cannot achieve. The argument proceeds by placing prompting into conversation with several bodies of literary and rhetorical theory. It begins with the mid-twentieth-century debates over authorship associated with Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, arguing that prompting intensifies rather than resolves the questions those debates raised: if meaning was already understood to be completed by an interpreting reader rather than fixed by an originating author, prompting introduces a second, non-human interlocutor who intervenes during composition itself, displacing and redistributing authorial intention before a finished text exists at all. The human prompter is repositioned as something closer to a librettist, a director, or a translator than to a sole originating author, retaining a directing role while relinquishing exclusive control over phrasing, structure, and even conceptual elaboration. The article then turns to Mikhail Bakhtin's account of dialogism to explain the temporal and structural shape of sustained prompting. Where a single prompt met by a single output might be dismissed as an isolated and rather thin speech act, most substantive prompting in practice takes the form of an extended, iterative exchange in which the prompter responds to what the system produces, refines instructions, supplies new constraints, and adjusts tone or direction in light of the system's previous response. This turn-by-turn structure externalises, in an unusually literal way, the dialogic quality that Bakhtin located within the novel's absorption of multiple voices, and suggests that the proper unit of literary-critical analysis is not the isolated prompt but the exchange as a whole, with its characteristic rhythms of proposal, response, correction, and refinement—rhythms that also resonate, the article suggests, with call-and-response traditions in oral and performative literatures, including the antiphonal structures of Bengali kirtan and pala-gaan.