Speculating AI’s “Second Life”: Youth’s Carnivalesque (Re)Writing with AI

• In Event: Speculative Futures with and Against AI: Youth Worldbuilding as Sociotechnical Intervention

Abstract

Over the last three years, we have witnessed a rapid uptake of generative AI technologies across the varied spaces where young people read and write, embedded in social media platforms, search engines, and dedicated generative AI interfaces like ChatGPT (Robinson & Hollett, 2024). As AI technology continues to advance into the lives of young writers, it raises profound questions: How do youth writers reimagine authorship, subjectivity, and relationality through speculative engagements with AI, and what are the possibilities and constraints of these practices?
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’ approaches to AI in their everyday composing lives. This paper focuses on one youth writer's composing practices on Status Ai, a tool that stimulates social media platforms. As a critical user of AI, their creative practices are layered with a persistent negotiation: keeping AI’s normative discourses in check while transforming them to speculate new realities.
Bakhtin’s theory of carnival, a festive departure from life’s routines and conventions whereby all that is “official and consecrated” (1984, p. 257) is turned ‘inside out” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 11) underpins our analysis of youth’s speculative encounters with AI technologies. We operationalize Bakhtin’s carnival to read the ways youth writers textualize the internal platform logics of LLMs as they playfully reconstitute relations amongst humans, machines, and characters. As these carnivalesque transgressions dialectically interplay with the status quo (Stallybrass & White, 1986), here, the new autonomous model of literacy (Robinson, 2023), this study draws on feminist of color epistemology and critical race theory to read youth’s speculative AI writing as counterstory to AI’s authoritative discourse (Smithermann, 1977; Solorzano & Yosso, 2002; Tolliver, 2020) even as youth’s carnivalesque writing trains LLMs.
This exploration of youth’s speculative writing is situated within the fourth design phase of our design based research (DBR) study (Hoadley & Campos, 2022). A set of in-depth case studies (n=7) were conducted based on the learnings from the three design phases with youth who positioned themselves as expert users of AI. This in-depth case study follows C, a 16-year-old fantasy writer, novelist, and co-researcher on the study, using multiple generative AI tools and platforms for both in-and out-of-school purposes. We collected writing samples and conducted two screencapture interviews (Møller & Robards, 2019) on C’s AI writing practices.
In their second screencapture interview, C fed character bios to Status.AI, which simulated the characters’ online activities. Critiquing Status’s algorithmic exclusion of queer and nonwhite voices, C transformed AI’s writing to story a carnivalesque “second life” (Bakhtin, 1984). C’s writing, “hostile to all that is immortalized” (Bakhtin, 1984, p. 8), imagined alternative modes of subjectivity between human and machine (Wynter, 2003), framing authorship as knowing, rather than owning, their characters. Composing carnivalesque relationalities, C transformed the power-laden discourses available in their digital contexts (Berlin, 1988; Lensmire, 1994). C’s playfully resistant AI engagements highlight how youth’s writing with AI can speculatively rewrite dominant platform logics.

Authors

• Rabani Garg, University of Pennsylvania

• Clara Abbott, University of Pennsylvania

• Amy Stornaiuolo, University of Pennsylvania