Beyond Authenticity: How Youth Authors Negotiate Writerly Voice in the Age of AI

• In Event: Tinkering With/Tripping It Up: Youth Shift, Interrupt, and Challenge Conceptualizations Around Their AI Use.

Abstract

Objectives
While dominant discourses often characterize youth’s writing with AI as inauthentic, plagiarized, or illegitimate, this paper explores how youth writers contemplate the ethical, critical, and aesthetic dimensions of writing in ways that challenge those conceptualizations. This design based research (DBR) study (Hoadley & Campos, 2022) brings together an intergenerational team of high school, undergraduate, doctoral, and university researchers to examine young writers’ sensemaking practices as they engage with AI in their everyday composing lives. The study investigates the question of writerly ‘voice’, asking how young people consider their identities and voices as writers when they write with, for, and about machines.

Perspectives
This study engages with Authors’ (2022) conception of “youth as philosophers'' that understands young people as agentive users, creators, and critics of technology (Mirra et al., 2018; Gutiérrez et al., 2019). Such an agentive approach to youth’s technology use recognizes how the digital is deeply interwoven into young people’s everyday sociomaterial practices (Jandrić et al., 2018) and the need for critical understandings of the entangled, messy, and unpredictable nature of these socio-technical relationships in postdigital research (Jandrić & Knox, 2022). In studying youth’s writerly identities in digital spaces, we draw on Lammers and Marsh’s (2018) conceptualization of identities as negotiated and laminated in/through practice with other people, tools, and histories.

Methods/Data
Over two design phases, the study investigated the generative AI tools and practices by youth through an AI/writing contest (Phase 1; n=15) and subsequent in-depth case studies (Phase 2; n=10). After engaging in thematic and inductive analysis of artifacts (Miles et al., 2018), the team drew on DBR findings from Phase 1 (Penuel et al., 2011) to recruit 10 participants (ages 12-20) who wrote with AI in particular ways. In Phase 2, the team collected examples of student writing and conducted two screencapture interviews (Møller & Robards, 2019) with case study participants. Phase 2 data (via Atlas.ti) was analyzed using the constant comparative method (Lincoln & Guba, 1985).


Findings/Significance
As educators, schools, and researchers contend with technopanics surrounding generative AI, this paper illuminates how youth writers are already engaged in these conversations through their writing practice. By tinkering, tripping, and challenging AI tools (e.g., “I gave the system this prompt but it was unwilling to choose a side…”), youth grappled with complex ethical and critical considerations (“I felt like I was cheating…but the way that it was so accommodating to my requests made me feel a bit better.”). While youth emphasized staying true to their writerly voice, they cared less where they felt the project was not meaningful (e.g. using AI to “take back” time). Youth writers were not uncritical adopters, with many sharing the importance of having control over their voice as writers and centering their “own integrity” in deciding the ethical/moral use of generative AI tools. Rooted in youth’s actual orientations to AI, this study offers insights to educators and researchers to equitably support youth’s AI literacy development and ethical decision-making, beyond moralistic/punitive measures.

Authors

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

• Mary Elizabeth Talian, University of Pennsylvania

• Jennifer Freed, University of Pennsylvania