Keeping the File Open

This essay uses Harry Shearer’s “Apologies of the Week” segment on Le Show as an occasion to revisit what researchers have said about the “age of apology.” It considers how “The Apologies of the Week” can help scholars think about the mechanics of apology and about robotic rhetorical gestures in general, especially given the explosion of generative AI and the flood of computationally generated writing in our contemporary environment. Shearer’s parody of robotic apologies points to a mode of critique that might be especially important at a moment in time when the mechanisms of robot writing are often hidden from view. As Large Language Models aim to sound more and more like humans, we will need ways to highlight the robotic rhetorical gesture, no matter who or what is behind it.