Dear readers, for this month’s feature, we’re bringing you a piece from the Spring 2024 issue of WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. In this Tutor’s Column piece, Dani Lester talks about Generative AI (GenAI) and the deeper issues it raises. Here’s an except:
Writers may feel reluctant to disagree with GenAI because advertising often personifies GenAI as intelligent and objective. However, it is simply amalgamations riddled with biases: GenAI creators and owners restrict topics deemed offensive or dangerous, decided not democratically or publicly but by individuals and business owners who may be incentivized primarily to monetize rather than inform AI users. Understanding this about GenAI is crucial to understanding its limitations and the danger it poses to writing. GenAI, by nature of its creation and monetization, obfuscates authentic positional perspective and limits diversity in authorial voices.
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While GenAI may be a new threat, writing centers have long been concerned with student ownership and honoring diverse positionalities, voice, and linguistic variation. After all, academic writing was exclusionary and homogenous long before GenAI. Non-white, non-male positional perspectives have historically been limited and silenced (Baker-Bell). While tutors have some tools to combat linguistic racism, GenAI exacerbates the core, systemic issues within writing, intensifying the need for more radical, community-wide changes in writing centers and classrooms.
Did you know that that WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship has become a member of the WAC Clearinghouse family of open-access publications? That means you can access past and current issues of WLN at no cost. Copyright © for WLN is held by its editorial staff.
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