Giving Voice to Generative AI Refusal in Rhetoric and Writing Studies
by Maggie Fernandes and Megan McIntyre
The podcast Everyone's Writing with AI (Except Me!) was born in the summer of 2024, after nearly a year and a half of writing studies discourse about how to adopt, incorporate, and respond to generative AI. As two writing teachers who don't police generative AI in our classrooms but also don't want to facilitate its instruction, we felt (and feel) that there is a gap in the conversation. This gap encompasses multiple research questions: How do we refuse the generative AI takeover? How do we resist the further EdTech-ificaiton of writing classes, writing programs, and higher education more generally?
We wanted to be able to respond both to the emergent disciplinary conversation and the broader conversation about technology and higher education. When news about the environmental impact of generative AI hit mainstream media as both Google and Microsoft announced they failed to meet climate goals, we knew we wanted to talk to Dustin Edwards about his work on digital damage (Edwards, 2020), as one example. Both of us enjoy podcasts and have for many years admired the impressive rosters of writing studies podcasts: The Big Rhetorical Podcast, Pedagogue, and re:Verb, to name a few. We've been inspired, too, by critical podcasts like Paris Marx's Tech Won't Save Us and linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna's Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, which often take on the subject of AI hype.
Throughout this webtext, you will listen to the introductory episode of Everyone's Writing with AI (Except Me!) (which we've divided into three parts so we can give you some additional context), as well as a Kairos-exclusive interview episode with Dr. Michael Black. We conclude with shownotes about this podcast and how it responds to an emergent conversation in rhetoric and writing studies. The first three episodes you will listen to are segments of the first official episode of the podcast, which explain why this podcast exists, what generative AI refusal is and what it can look like in writing programs, and what the future of this podcast is. The fourth episode is an interview with Dr. Michael Black, in which we talk with him about user friendliness and writing instruction that doesn't fall victim to AI hype and anthropomorphization. Finally, we conclude with shownotes and references. Taken together, these episodes give voice to generative AI refusal and demonstrate the need for more and multivocal conversations about generative AI and the future of writing pedagogies.
