New Book: ? Artificial Infrastructures ?

Artificial Infrastructures, a new book by Michael J. Salvo and John T. Sherrill, joins the publications at the WAC Clearinghouse. This book appears in the Practices & Possibilities book series, which I edit with Aimee McClure, Aleashia Walton, and Jagadish Paudel.

Artificial Infrastructures investigates how generative AI is reshaping the work of technical and professional writing across high-technology industries—from image analysis and documentation to medical manufacturing. Building on expert interviews and grounded narrative, Salvo and Sherrill examine the experiences of practitioners who have shaped the development of AI systems and who integrate AI tools into their daily work, illuminating the social, rhetorical, and infrastructural changes that follow.

Rather than focusing on dramatic disruptions or utopian promises, Artificial Infrastructures attends to ways AI systems are embedded into workflows and reconfigure expectations for what writing and professional communication entail, arguing for a nuanced understanding of co-writing and machine-in-the-loop systems and offering both a critical lens and practical strategies for navigating a rapidly changing technological landscape. Central to this argument is a recognition that management decisions shape how AI is integrated into the workplace and what labor gets displaced. It is a timely guide for readers confronting the question: What now?

You can find the book at https://wac.colostate.edu/books/practice/artificial/. This book, like other books published by the Clearinghouse, will be available in a print edition from University Press of Colorado in the coming months. Thanks to Michael and John for their work on the book and for their decision to share it with us as an open-access publication. Thanks as well to the anonymous peer reviewers who contributed to its development.