Open events

In writing studies, we know we are on the cusp of enormous transformation. Changes are coming fast, and every day we are faced with new technological innovations. Since Open AI was released in November 2022, it has become easily accessible and used by millions of people all over the world. Generative text AI has the capacity to engage in intellectual tasks, to learn and innovate, and to produce human-like text. These are proving to be highly successful products. It’s fair to say, these systems have the potential to disrupt higher education as we know it because they are not only assisting human authorship but potentially replacing it (Walczak & Cellary, 2023). For scholars who have developed a career centred on helping masters and doctoral students to write theses and dissertations, and publish in research contexts, we appear to be in a paradigm shift. For graduate students, writing is crucial to their scholarly expression and identity development. Proponents of AI suggest that systems like Chat GPT can produce every aspect of research writing from developing research questions, to generating and revising the research paper. All of this seems to require a rethinking of the way we conceptualize writing, how we approach writing pedagogies, how we ask students to engage in writing and how we, ourselves, write and publish. It’s no longer a matter of if we engage in generative text AI but how. Of course, this new technology is exciting and seductive with possibilities. But as with all new technologies, we often get caught up in the narrow view, the surface minutia, while the deeper issues, the geo-politics and the material bodies, drop from sight (Healy 2023; Stahl & Eke, 2024). What happens to our risky vulnerabilities, the ones that direct us to passion and poetics? What narratives do we create to accommodate these contradictions? How can we help graduate writers navigate these uncertain spaces?