Source: The Conversation – Canada
What would it mean to teach students who are learning academic writing to use AI in “ethical” ways — for example, large language model (LLM) chatbots like ChatGPT, a specific form of GenAI?
In rhetoric and writing studies, guiding documents on the teaching of writing and literature caution against all-out bans and call for guidance on ethically incorporating LLMs into writing.
My institution, the University of Victoria, is “committed to support the use of AI in transparent, responsible, ethical and equitable ways.”
In the context of teaching writing, “ethics” and AI tends to be shorthand for academic integrity, informed by questions about composing and authorship, transparency and the writing process.
However, even when ethical guidance around AI use includes reflecting on when AI is appropriate at all, this often assumes, as a foregone conclusion, that ethical AI use is a possibility.
AI has environmental costs, and raises profound social and human concerns. We are doing students learning academic writing a disservice if we don’t think more broadly about what “ethical” use means.
Classrooms are political spaces
Writing is inherently bound up with power, and many writing studies scholars and teachers see classrooms as inherently political spaces. They focus on practices that equip students to add their voices to academic conversations, without compromising their ways of knowing.
For these scholars, classrooms are places to develop anti-racist, equitable and inclusive practices.
Many encourage students to question power and privilege, especially in first-year writing classrooms. Students learn to build arguments, organize evidence and communicate effectively to specific audiences. They gain transferable skills and experiences that can be foundational for structuring the rest of post-secondary life.
Read more:
How a first-year university writing course for Indigenous students fostered skills and belonging
Tyler Branson, a professor of literature who also teaches composition, describes how “we might be better off thinking of first-year writing as a course in the practice of citizenship” instead of a course in academic writing. He argues that “society needs students skilled in civic discourse now more than ever.”
A larger sphere of ethical inquiry
We should provide students with reasons for and opportunities to resist and refuse GenAI.
In reasoning about this, I draw on my training in rhetoric to ask what rhetorical scholar Judy Z. Segal calls “prior questions:” Asking “what” and “why” rather than starting from the basis of “how.”
As Segal explains, rather than asking, for example: “How to make cosmetic surgery safer?” we might ask “How and why it is possible that we see ourselves in need of improvement via cosmetic surgery in the first place”?
Educators should be asking “prior questions” around ethical use of LLM chatbots.
When we think about these “how” questions in relation to LLM chatbots and the first-year writing classroom — “How to teach students to engage with these ethically and responsibly?” — we need to step back and consider what “ethical” means.
‘Writing involves making ethical choices’
In the collection Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, John Duffy, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, contributes a short essay, “Writing Involves Making Ethical Choices.”
According to Duffy, every time we write for another person, we’re proposing a relationship with the reader or readers. He’s particularly interested in ethical questions for writers such as:
“What kind of person do I want to be? How should I treat others? How should I live my life?”
With the prevalence of GenAI, how we choose to write, and not just to whom and about what, has become a site of ethical choices as well.
What values are normalized?
When educators in writing classes make choices about how to engage with LLM chatbots or other forms of GenAI, we must expand our ideas of ethics beyond authorship and academic integrity.
We should also discuss environmental impacts, exploitative offshore labour and how the logic of economic markets is affecting key resource use (energy, water, land and minerals) and arguments for (and against) adoption.
As media studies expert Kate Crawford reminds us, theories of AI must account for “the states and corporations that drive and dominate it, the extractive industries that leave an imprint on the planet, the mass capture of data and the profoundly unequal and increasingly exploitative labour practices that sustain it.”
If educators default to “how” to use AI ethically in our classrooms, we bypass a more fundamental question of: “What makes us think this is ethical in the first place?”
Expectations, habits, norms
Drawing on the logic of “prior concerns,” educators should reflect on what values we encourage or normalize when we tell students that it’s OK to turn to ChatGPT and how these values could shape expectations, habits and norms.
Research has shown, for example, that ChatGPT uses lavish, qualitative praise as a default setting. Will this instant feedback realistically prepare students for participating in human networks, including receiving feedback from teachers or peers?
If writing instructors normalize turning to an LLM chatbot for discussion, we also risk normalizing students’ avoidance of the effort it takes to talk to someone at the writing centre, visit office hours or consult a librarian.
The ‘AI refusal’ approach in writing studies
One solution is turning to the “GenAI refusal” approach in writing studies. Writing studies scholars Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan McIntyre and Maggie Fernandes position refusal as a “disciplinary and principled response” to GenAI use in the writing classroom.
They offer 10 reasons that refusal is a warranted response to GenAI. While each of these reasons is persuasive, I point to number 10:
Writing instructors are in a position to help our students think critically about what responsibilities we have to each other, the world and its future. As inherently political spaces, first-year writing courses in particular should provide students with reasons to resist and refuse GenAI, and opportunities to do so.
Loren Gaudet does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Original source: https://analysis1.mil-osi.com/2026/11/11/why-teaching-ethical-classroom-use-of-ai-to-learn-writing-must-include-the-right-to-refuse/