- Maker: Courtney Rosenthal
- Genre: Parody
- Level: Graduate
- Program: Composition, Rhetoric, and Digital Media
- Course: WRIT 5340: Studies in Multimodality and Digital Media
- Instructor: Dr. Eric Mason
- Semester Created: Winter 2023
Parody is inherently polemic to a degree and “the understanding of parody is culturally bound” (Kaltenbacher et al. 185) given that it oftentimes draws on specific, relevant events to critique or mock. It seems as if parody is on the rise with the prominence of memes spread on the internet, that often rely on a knowledge of certain events – making them intertextual in nature.
ChatGPT and other AI-based technologies have become a spectacle: growing in relevancy, garnering polarizing opinions and becoming ingrained in pop-culture. In designing this project, I struggled to find the right medium that would properly parody this spectacle, but I settled on that of a digital article. It feels as if everyday we come across a news article that attempts to predict what the effect these technologies may have on us, all the while having a complete misunderstanding of how they are programmed. Craig Stroupe’s “Hacking the Cool” text additionally inspired this choice in his proposal that writing culture invents new forms by “turning the tools and styles of cool, postmodern pastiche back on itself in the form of cultural parody” (p.441). I envision my parody as one that additionally critiques the writing culture found in digital clickbait articles, I am effectively “hacking the cool” in my mimicry of them.
I created a graphic, meant to emulate a page out of a modern digital news article, that parodies the language and design of these misinformed media outlets. The photos utilized were meant to represent the overly-romanticized view of AI technologies, as they are often portrayed as humanoid cyborg creatures that now inhabit our world, despite being anything but that in actuality. The effect is typically meant to instill a sort of fear that they are becoming so advanced that they will eventually one day overtake us. Here, I turn it on its head and use it to defend why we should “welcome our robot overlords.” My language borders on ironic, but is meant to imitate that of a content writer who knows nothing about what they are writing about, yet wants to make content to keep up with current events. I carry a relaxed tone throughout to sound like a “relatable influencer” and topped it off with a clickbait title. The overarching parody is of the spectacle that ChatGPT has become, but, I additionally critique the misuse of these technologies, our over-estimation of their capabilities, and poke fun at consumerist culture.
Works Cited
Kaltenbacher, Martin, et al. Perspectives on Multimodality. J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 2004.
Stroupe, Craig. “Hacking the Cool: The Shape of Writing Culture in the Space of New Media.” Computers and Composition, vol. 24, no. 4, 2007, pp. 421–442., https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2007.08.004.
