Overlord, Savior, or Paintbrush? Exploring AI Metaphors Through Reading and Writing With and About AI

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

Abstract

AI has been called a “suitcase word” for all of the varied meanings that people pack inside it (Minsky, 2007). It has been compared to calculators, equated with evil robots, and used as a symbol of technological prowess to market products. Agreeing on what AI is has proven to be a complicated endeavor, even from the early days of its development (e.g., see descriptions of the “AI effect,” which refers to the phenomenon of shifting expectations of AI alongside changing computer capabilities) and this has created both opportunities and challenges. The lack of concrete definitions of AI or its role in areas of society as well as the speed with which it is being adopted, critiqued, and demonized means that those who are attempting to make sense of the AI landscape struggle to find answers. In this study, we explore how students in an undergraduate course make sense of what AI is, can do, and might be by interacting with AI as a technical (writing) tool and as a fictional object.
In our study design and analysis, we draw on critical digital literacy and posthumanist theories as well as speculative pedagogies (Garcia & Mirra, 2023; Robinson, 2023; Authors, 2024). The intersections of these theories and the role of metaphor in shaping understanding allows us as researchers to see how our students make sense of AI as a tool for thinking, reading, writing, and creating.The study was conducted in Spring of 2024 in a semester-long undergraduate course at a private university. 10 students, all STEM majors, elected to take this writing-intensive course centered on reading about and writing with AI, designed and taught by the second author. During the course, students read fiction texts featuring AI, watched science fiction films, wrote with and reflected on using generative AI tools, and created their own fiction with and about AI. Data analysis included coding, in multiple cycles (Saldaña, 2021), of artifacts from class discussions, 10 final AI fiction stories, researcher field notes, and weekly writing assignments. Our research questions included:
What AI metaphors do students identify, use, and remix in their own writing?
What functions do engaging with media about AI and tinkering with AI directly serve in developing students’ understandings of what AI is or could be?
We report on several themes in our analysis: disciplinary perspectives on AI, especially on AI and writing; functions of disjunctures between “real” and imagined AI; and student concern with equitable access to AI. In each theme, we discuss student sense-making through figurative language, and how it evolved through the course of the semester. We conclude with implications for classroom practice, particularly focusing on a key set of critical and speculative “moves” that the teacher-researcher and students made when interacting with AI as a technical and a fictional object. We argue that how students conceive of, and create with, AI matters for how they build their future with (or without) it, so we must develop ways to support their creative exploration of its potential.

Authors

• Sarah Burriss, Vanderbilt University

• Melanie Hundley, Vanderbilt University