Coppin State Writing Center

Why Understanding AI Doesn’t Necessarily Lead People to Embrace It New research has uncovered a paradoxical relationship between AI literacy and receptivity: Individuals with lower AI literacy are more likely to embrace AI, despite perceiving it as less capable and m...

When you remember that "generative AI" is just a business product, then learning more about the product, realizing it doesn't do everything you thought it could, and tempering one's enthusiasm as a result is a reasonable response.

As writing centers know, context is valuable.

Grok's remodeling illustrates a particular and significant concern about generative AI for our writing center. College writers are expected to trust a product that can be remade so readily to reflect... this?

New research from MIT found that those who used ChatGPT can’t remember any of the content of their essays.

Key takeaway: the product doesn’t suffer, but the process does. And when it comes to essays, the process *is* how they learn.

arxiv.org/pdf/2506.088...

Congress: Oppose The 10-Year Ban on AI Regulation A provision slipped into the reconciliation bill to ban all state-level AI regulations for 10 years. Urge Congress to oppose this ban immediately.

The Senate is considering a bill that would prevent states from making any regulations on AI for ten years with no federal alternative.

This gives Big Tech a blank check to deploy these technologies without oversight or consequences. Tell Congress: Oppose the ten-year ban on AI regulation.

Teachers Are Not OK AI, ChatGPT, and LLMs "have absolutely blown up what I try to accomplish with my teaching."

I talked to 15 teachers/professors about how AI and ChatGPT is ruining their lives:

www.404media.co/teachers-are...

What’s “Critical” About Critical AI? Or, Why I’m Still Not Convinced We Should Be Teaching Students to Use LLM Chatbots I must admit that I have

New blog post: What’s “Critical” About Critical AI? Or, Why I’m Still Not Convinced We Should Be Teaching Students to Use LLM Chatbots

This is based on an excerpt from my #cwcon25 keynote, where I discuss the rhetoric of "criticality" in AI discourse.

refusinggenai.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/w...

It's important to make the distinction between "ChatGPT gives you an answer" and "ChatGPT gives you the model of what an answer would look like" because there are differences in what we assume in both statements. What do people think of when you ask them to think about the idea of a "model"?

This is a problem we are especially attuned to as an HBCU writing center, given that the biases within large language models tend to devalue linguistic diversity, which can pose unnecessary problems for our writers.

The Parlett L. Moore Library at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland

It's a beautiful day for some writing.

Please send me the funny/terrible Google AI/chat GPT search results you have spotted. For example, the one that suggests eating one small rock per day, or the one that suggests using an iron to smooth your scrotum wrinkles.

Part 2 of the LinkedIn post: Ch. 2 Technical Performance appears to rely heavily on self-reporting by AI companies, which should therefore be interpreted as potential or likely marketing arguments. In addition, there’s a heavy reliance on the method of benchmarking. Not only is benchmarking limited as the report itself acknowledges on pp. 100–102, but benchmarks are also often more reflective of the values of the companies & orgs that set them—including their views of “human ability”—than anything else. For instance, the report mentions the Turing test as a longstanding benchmark. I think we need to be clear that the Turing test is a measure of whether people can tell the difference between a chatbot and a human writer—which I think most would agree that it’s quite difficult if not impossible to tell at this point—and not the actual “intelligence” of an LLM chatbot as some might presume, nor its efficacy by any number of other metrics. The other source cited is a report from OpenAI. Although presented and formatted as a technical report, this document should also be contextualized as a marketing effort to bolster the legitimacy of OpenAI’s product. In addition, the claim that GPT-4 “scored in the 93rd percentile on the SAT (Reading & Writing), the 99th percentile on the GRE Verbal exam, the 85th-100th percentile on [several] AP exams” says more about the limits and problems of standardized testing, not to mention admissions processes, than it does the competence of GPT-4 or its ability in comparison to human intelligence or performance. I’m actually really curious to see meaningful evidence that substantiates these claims that current chatbots are remarkably capable at writing or any of the other things that these companies are claiming, so if you have something like that, please feel free to share! Anyway, here’s a source on Evaluating Arguments about GenAI that may be useful: https://refusinggenai.wordpress.com/evaluating-arguments/

Part 2

LinkedIn post that begins: I appreciate this effort to push the conversation forward while acknowledging dissenting perspectives but I have to point out that the sources used to substantiate the claim that “today’s major GenAI tools are remarkably competent when compared to previous systems from only a few years ago,” or that “They have now surpassed non-expert human performance in many areas central to education” must be read with much greater criticality. (Excuse the essay ahead, which continues into the comments.) For example, the co-directors of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Index Report are Yolanda Gil and Raymond Perrault, the latter of whom is an AI researcher & Distinguished Computer Scientist at SRI International, where he spent 30 years as director of the Artificial Intelligence Center. In other words, he's staked his career in AI and thus has a vested interested in its success. Steering committee members include folks affiliated with Anthropic and Google, and supporting partners include private companies who have a massive financial stake in the success of generative AI, including Google & OpenAI. These are all factors that should inform our understanding of the goals of the report. Next, the report intersperses information about AI with claims about generative AI. This rhetorical move contributes to the conflation of products and technologies that have very different purposes, functions, outcomes, and implications. In addition, I would argue that the Top Takeaways listed on pp. 3–5 have little to do with the functional capabilities of these products and more to do with uptake, investment, and outlook—things that are more reflective of marketing success than anything else. (Interestingly, the report makes it very easy to pick up the claims it wants you to take away through its Chapter Highlights, Overviews, and Reviews, which may be a fine summary but insufficient for understanding the credibility of the claims being made.)

I spent a bunch of time responding to some uptake of AI hype in the educational sector and am sharing here bc I think it's important to see examples of what this looks like and how to assess it—and also to have a reminder of the value of rhetorical analysis www.linkedin.com/posts/jsanof...

Reframing Resistance to AI Online Symposium Reframing Resistance to AI April 23, 2025 | 9:30 - 5:30 EDT | An Online Symposium Zoom Registration: https://go.wm.edu/lCxjcs While some may be surprised by the recent attacks on the sciences and h...

Happening today: Reframing Resistance to AI: An Online Symposium organized by the Equality Lab @ William & Mary docs.google.com/document/d/1...

@nobugsnous.bsky.social @rcmeg.bsky.social & I are presenting @ 3:20–4:20 PM EDT—and you can chat w/the brill @nobugsnous.bsky.social during the Q&A!

Q&A on New Book About Critical Race Theory’s Origins Aja Martinez and Robert Smith say in a new book that the roots of CRT show that the academic discipline is uniquely American and an extension of the civil rights movement.

Check out @rosmith.bsky.social and my interview with @insidehighered.com

www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty...

A promotional image for an informational session and writing workshop, which will focus on potential regulatory changes to student loan forgiveness that the U.S. Department of Education may make.

The Department of Education is looking for public testimonies about student loan forgiveness, so join us in the Parlett Moore Library this afternoon and next Tuesday to learn more about the topic and how to make your voice heard.

Here is an interesting adjective quirk that you probably aren’t even aware you are doing.

In English, adjectives seem to follow a specific order:

opinion - size - age - shape - color - origin - material - purpose - noun

Even accepting the premise that AI produces useful writing (which no one should), using AI in education is like using a forklift at the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

"AI work is just as good as human work" is a statement that *always* flows from the direction of power. Employers to workers, producers to consumers, but not the reverse.

Because it's not a thing people actually believe, but an argument: slop is good enough for you; you are slop.

Editors' Roundtable Speaking Script - 4C25 [Title Slide] Welcome, everyone to our session: Academic Publishing: The Present and Future State of Editing and publishing in Writing Studies. If this is not the session you thought you were in, ple...

Here's our script thing! #E21 #4C25
docs.google.com/document/d/1...

So how do we create "temporal landmarks" for students, so they can start to use time differently? How can we give them a different sense of how time can be wrangled? (#BA7 #4C25)

Universities (and institutions) are obsessed with time, believing it can be managed. But the experience of inhabiting/using time is different from the systemic of understanding of it.
(#BA7 #4C25)

Factors influencing the use of AI tools, according to Annette Vee in #A9:
- Prior media histories (personal, pop-cultural)
- Other people’s use of AI (coworkers, teachers)
- Concerns about what AI is doing to them (dependency, deskilling)
- Future of the profession (shifting expectations)
#4C25

#4C25 Indigenous Storytelling and Storywork panel of graduate students, in a sea of GAI discussions, is a vibe. Conversely, FYW students telling their own stories is how we help build student voices in light of GAI proliferation. #academicsky #composition #rhetoric #communication

Excited for #4C25

"What if we focused even more on writing as persistence?" If we highlighted that sitting with discomfort is the point, the goal, of what we do? (Sano-Franchini #4C25)

Normalization of genAI intensifies the ways language use is often geared towards white supremacist expectations in communication, including and perhaps especially, academic and professional communication. (Sano-Franchini #4C25)

And another great article from Fernandes and McIntyre folks should read, published via Peitho: wac.colostate.edu/docs/peitho/...
(Sano-Franchini #4C25)

Refusing Generative AI in Writing Studies Visit the post for more.

She invokes the extremely important work she's done with Maggie Fernandes and @rcmeg.bsky.social on Refusing AI: refusinggenai.wordpress.com
(Sano-Franchini #4C25)

2025 CCCC Chair’s Address Sano-Franchini Timely, (Un)Disciplinary, and Solutions-Oriented: Remembering and Enacting Abundance in These Times When We Just Have to Keep Going [SLIDE] Part 1. This is Not a Talk About A.I. Imagine that a sale...

Time for @jsanofranchini.bsky.social's talk! And here it is: docs.google.com/document/d/1...
#4C25

Since #4C25 kicks off today here in Baltimore, it's a good time to bump the starter pack that I created to connect the writing center community here on Bluesky! We can workshop an official hashtag -- #writingcentersky? #WCsky? -- and think/write out loud about our work.