Being Human in the Age of Generative AI: Young People’s Ethical Concerns About Writing and Living With Machines

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 2:30 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Critical Sociotechnical Perspectives on Young People Using, Experiencing, and Making Sense of AI (Table 17)

Abstract

Part of a social design-based experiment (Gutiérrez, 2016) that explored secondary English language arts (ELA) classes as sites for interdisciplinary computing education (Author, 2019; Author, under review), this qualitative study offers a window into young people’s everyday experiences with AI-mediated writing and their perspectives regarding AI’s impacts on social life. The study draws on student survey and focus group data from ELA classes in two culturally and linguistically diverse high schools to explore the following questions:

1. How are young people using AI in their everyday lives, if at all?
2. What do young people understand as major issues related to AI-mediated writing?
3. What critical considerations, if any, inform young people’s sense-making of and practices with AI?

Our inquiry is designed around the premise that young people are “critical agents of technology,” a philosophical orientation toward youth as actors who take up moral and ethical considerations of technology “to catalyze social, cultural, or political transformation” (Vakil & McKinney de Royston, 2022, p. 4). Such an orientation eschews one-dimensional or damage-centered narratives about young people by emphasizing their agency as “historical actors” who can work toward social transformation by interrogating their everyday practices, including their literacy practices (Gutiérrez et al., 2019, p. 291). Data sources analyzed in this study include survey responses (130 completed surveys) and three student focus groups. Guided by the research questions, the researchers engaged in first- and second-cycle coding of the open-ended survey responses and the focus group transcripts (Saldaña, 2016).

Broadly, we found that most students viewed generative AI as a tool that can mediate particular learning and life opportunities within social systems. Many students stated that AI has already changed how people write and read, for better or worse. Many also grappled with ethical concerns regarding how people should be using generative AI, concerns that were largely centered around what it means to be human through and with advancing technologies. Questions about what counts as “authentic” and “fair” were intertwined with concerns over the nature of labor and learning, as students weighed affordances (e.g., efficiencies) and constraints (e.g., harms) of AI in deciding when and how to use it.

Findings suggest students were actively and regularly navigating critical and ethical considerations related to generative AI, both in and out of school. These findings counter monolithic constructions of youth as unconcerned, uncritical users of technology and highlight the important role schools can play in supporting young people’s sociotechnical inquiries. Literacies practitioners and researchers who seek to create humanizing and equitable learning and life opportunities in the age of AI have much to learn from youth (Filipiak et al., 2020). To that end, this study centered young people’s perspectives on how generative AI is shaping writing and mediating possible social futures.

Authors

• Jennifer Higgs, University of California - Davis

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania