The Platformization of Writing Instruction: Considering Educational Equity in New Learning Ecologies

The recent unveiling of chatbots such as ChatGPT has catalyzed vigorous debates about generative AI's impact on how learners read, write, and communicate. Largely missing from these debates is careful consideration of how young people are experiencing AI in their everyday lives and how they are making sense of the questions that these rapidly evolving cultural tools raise about ethics, power, and social participation. Engaging cultural‐historical perspectives on technology, the present study drew on student survey and focus group data from English language arts classes in two culturally and linguistically diverse high schools to answer the following questions: (1) How are young people using AI in their everyday lives, if at all?; (2) What do young people identify as key considerations related to AI‐mediated writing?; and (3) What ethical and critical considerations, if any, inform young people's sensemaking of and practices with AI? Young people reported using generative AI for diverse purposes in and out of school, including to accomplish routine organizational and information tasks, to entertain themselves through experimenting with AI technologies, and to catalyze their thinking and writing processes. Survey and focus group participants' responses suggested their regular navigation of ethical and critical dimensions of AI use and their contemplation of what it means to be human through and with advancing technologies. Young people also reported a lack of opportunity to examine AI practices and perspectives in school, suggesting the important role schools can play in supporting youths' development of AI ethics.

Being Human in the Age of Generative AI: Young People's Ethical Concerns about Writing and Living with Machines

Higgs,

Stornaiuolo

2024

To Become an Object Among Objects: Generative Artificial “Intelligence,” Writing, and Linguistic White Supremacy

de Roock

2024

This paper critically explores the implications of generative artificial “intelligence” (GAI) technologies for literacy theory and practice through a case study of the author's use of OpenAI's ChatGPT. The study opens with an overview of recent literature surrounding the pedagogical implications of using GAI with a focus on issues of racial justice, outlining an abolitionist political ecology approach to literacy that extends relational theories of mediation to machine‐aided writing. The framework is then applied to data from a cognitive autoethnography of GAI use over a 6‐month period, which included a digital ethnography of ChatGPT and an extended semistructured “interview” with the GAI chatbot. Racial justice issues were found, especially linguistic and other biases. As such, soon‐to‐be ubiquitous artificial intelligence (AI) technologies require profound reconsideration of the productive value of literacy exploited by GAI, which will inevitably be pursued through an acquiescence or fundamental rupture with the dystopian visions of the technology's creators.

Literacy in the Time of Artificial Intelligence

Kalantzis,

Cope

2024

The latest mutation of Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, is more than anything a technology of writing. It is a machine that can write. In a world‐historical frame, the significance of this cannot be understated. This is a technology in which the unnatural language of code tangles with the natural language of everyday life. Its form of writing, moreover, is multimodal, able not only to write text as conventionally understood, but also to “read” images by matching textual labels and to “write” images from textual prompts. Within the scope of this peculiarly mechanical manufacturing of writing are mathematics, actionable software procedure, and algorithm. This paper explores the consequences of Generative AI for literacy teaching and learning. In its first part, we speak theoretically and historically, suggesting that this development is perhaps as momentous for society and education as Pi Sheng's invention of moveable type and Gutenberg's printing press—and in its peculiar ways just as problematic. In the paper's second part, we go on to propose that literacy in the time of AI requires a new way to speak about itself, a revised “grammar” of sorts. In a third part, we discuss an experimental application we have developed that puts Generative AI to work in support of literacy and learning. We end with some findings and implications for literacy education and with a proposal for what we will call cyber‐social literacy learning.