This article examines issues of authenticity involved in using generative AI to compose technical and professional communication (TPC) documents. Authenticity is defined through an Aristotelian understanding of ethos, which includes goodwill ( eunoia), practical wisdom ( phronesis), virtuousness ( arete), and Fromm's concepts of true self and pseudo self. The authors conducted an initial analysis of AI affordances that align with TPC concerns—genre, plain language, and grammatical/mechanical correctness. The preliminary results show that these affordances may be limited by issues of inauthenticity. The authors suggest that in order to address AI's limitations, writers should adopt a rhetoric of authenticity via real-world engagement, human centeredness, and personal style.

This article offers a content analysis of technical and professional communication articles related to user experience (TPC-UX) published between 2013 and 2022 in six TPC scholarly journals. This analysis reveals that TPC-UX primarily focuses on product and process topics and illustrates the terminological comingling of user experience and usability. Specific TPC-UX topics identified include theory, multimodality, health and medicine, localization, web design, mobile applications, accessibility, and content strategy. These topics suggest that TPC-UX's key affordances are its attunement to networked power dynamics, its theoretically rich treatment of multimodality, and its strategies for navigating contextual complexities.