The generative persona: reprograming rhetoric in an age of artificial intelligence and Donald Trump

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fundamental challenge to rhetoric, agency, and humanity. We argue that AI reveals how empowered audiences have created new post-human agencies beyond the speaker and the audience that we call the generative persona. This persona, forged in the ashes of what was once called the “author,” is unhinged from earthly coexistence and social accountabilities, because it exists as an ideal manifestation of its audiences’ affective rhetorical inputs. The generative persona auto-poetically creates new interactions, facts, and realities. We use the generative persona as a heuristic to analyze the agencies of Donald Trump and AI. We trace the homologies between Trump and AI by focusing on their engagement in three overlapping functions: resource consumption/grifting, stochastic parroting/repetition, and hallucinations/confabulations.