Collage is the New Writing: Exploring the Fragmentation of Text and User Interfaces in AI Tools

2024/05/27 by Daniel Buschek · 1 voice · 6 citations
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Artistic and Creative Research #Innovative Human-Technology Interaction #Writing and Handwriting Education #cs.CL #cs.HC

paper · pdf · doi:10.1145/3643834.3660681

openalex publication_date 2024/06/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29

Abstract

This essay proposes and explores the concept of Collage for the design of AI writing tools, transferred from avant-garde literature with four facets: 1) fragmenting text in writing interfaces, 2) juxtaposing voices (content vs command), 3) integrating material from multiple sources (e.g. text suggestions), and 4) shifting from manual writing to editorial and compositional decision-making, such as selecting and arranging snippets. The essay then employs Collage as an analytical lens to analyse the user interface design of recent AI writing tools, and as a constructive lens to inspire new design directions. Finally, a critical perspective relates the concerns that writers historically expressed through literary collage to AI writing tools. In a broad view, this essay explores how literary concepts can help advance design theory around AI writing tools. It encourages creators of future writing tools to engage not only with new technological possibilities, but also with past writing innovations.

Citations

• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots
• Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation
• The AI Ghostwriter Effect: When Users do not Perceive Ownership of AI-Generated Text but Self-Declare as Authors

Cited by

• Phraselette: A Poet’s Procedural Palette
• Textoshop: Interactions Inspired by Drawing Software to Facilitate Text Editing
• Agentic Reasoning and Refinement through Semantic Interaction
• How do university students ask GenAI to revise or proofread a text? A framework for analysing prompting strategies
• Collaborative Document Editing with Multiple Users and AI Agents
• The AI Memory Gap: Users Misremember What They Created With AI or Without

Discussions

• I really enjoyed "Collage is the New Writing: Exploring the Fragmentation of Text and User Interfaces in AI Tools" by @dbuschek.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2405.17217 [bsky, 6 points, 2 comments]

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