Crafting and designing AI-simulated audiences in the writing classroom

Despite audience awareness being fundamental to writing pedagogy, student writers often struggle to move beyond considering their instructor as the primary reader, making connections between audience analysis and actual writing practice difficult. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) when viewed as models of culture that can be prompted to adopt various audience personas, may enable writers to interact with simulated audiences across multiple theories of audience consideration. We thus critically review a taxonomy of five audience theories: (1) writing without audiences, (2) specific people as audiences, (3) discourse communities, (4) publics, and (5) networks/algorithms. Rather than using GenAI as a text production tool, we argue for using these technologies as objects of critical inquiry that allow students to “craft and design” audiences through iterative interaction. This approach encourages writers to critique the biased design of the technology itself as well as their own biases embedded in audience descriptions.