Generative AI and the Unwritten Future of Critical Literacy

ABSTRACT This essay seeks to clarify and engage the challenges that generative AI presents to students and teachers of college writing. For student writers, critical literacy offers an effective pedagogy in which students learn about academic expectations by reflecting on those expectations rather than merely attempting to mimic them. Generative AI presents students and teachers with invitations to forego these reflective capacities of writing and instead automatically reproduce academic expectations. Accordingly, in this essay we explore resources for engagement, situating critical scholarship on generative AI in relation to work in the field of Writing Studies promoting critical literacies for educational access. Here, we highlight the importance of involving students in learning writing as a practice that draws from their lived experience to scrutinize and deliberate the mediums that constitute their shared symbolic environment. Extending this linkage, we go on to share critical literacy activities and dialogs in which students create writing as a deliberative practice and foundational educational antidote to the automated indoctrination of chatbots.