Dr. Genie N. Giaimo, TPR Professional Editor
Associate Professor, Hofstra University
Generative AI rose like a sudden wave in late fall 2022. It crested during finals and crashed into many different conversations related to institutional policies and trainings, professional development, teaching pedagogy, academic integrity and the purpose and scope of the “college essay.” It has been the guiding topic of major academic conferences in the field, including the 2024 IWCA conference and the 2025 C’s conference. AI also has dominated popular culture conversations through countless think pieces and news media articles.
People proclaimed the death of the college essay (were we still teaching that in rhetoric and composition, anyway?) They proclaimed the end of college composition and the death of the writing center. Much of this hand wringing—to be sure—came from a place of precarity. Many academic workers—especially in writing centers—are contingent. AI seems like an ideal third-party client to shunt into academic tools to further defund in-house academic support and student services and the teaching of writing.
But the concerns surrounding AI’s role in academia are just one part of a much larger picture. Outside of academia, AI is impacting pretty much every facet of our lives from how we work (and what we are paid to work), to whether we are deemed qualifiable for a loan (or a job), to our medical diagnosis, art, media, and natural resources. As I write this, there are multiple fires raging in and around Los Angeles. Water has run dry in municipal pumps as tens (if not hundreds) of thousands have evacuated. Online, many are blaming AI’s water greediness for the pumps running dry and the fires remaining out of control and unquenchable. While AI might not be literally stealing water from the pumps needed to quell the fires, it does require massive amounts of water and energy to power it. We are in a time where the material realities of our lives are deeply intertwined with technology. The digital world is still material; it requires natural resources to run.
I can’t say that I am optimistic about a Generative AI world. This is not something many of us asked for but something that was unleashed on us—the wave that I feel like we have been riding forever, when it has only been two and a half years. AI has changed the ways in which writing centers train their tutors and discuss student writing. It has changed how institutions professionally develop their staff and faculty and it is already reshaping the professional world as well as the natural world.
No matter how we approach it, GenAI continues to be part of our reality.
There are, of course, arguments for non-engagement and refusal. There are others who argue that we should embrace AI in our classrooms and writing centers, working alongside it, like some neutral helpmate. We know that Generative AI is flawed and still makes mistakes. And, of course, there are many challenges with trying to identify AI-generated writing, including equity-based issues as AI detectors are woefully inaccurate. So, in many ways, writing center practitioners, especially, cannot remove ourselves entirely from these conversations as there are very real material factors that impact a writer’s journey that we help them to navigate. For example, multilingual writers might be inaccurately accused of using GenAI because of linguistic markers in their writing. Much like the plagiarism debates of the early 2000s, then, it is incumbent upon our field to grapple with the ways in which Generative AI impacts the writing classroom (and the writing center), for better and for worse. These ongoing debates, policy shifts, and pedagogical dilemmas make it all the more urgent to reflect on how writing centers are responding. While this special issue of TPR has been in the works for over a year, it is still a timely meditation on the impact of GenAI on writing centers, from how we train our tutors, to our policies on utilizing GenAI in tutorials, to how we are aligning with and against GenAI institutionally.
In the research shared in this first part of a double issue focused on AI in Writing Centers, many writing center practitioners are trying to find a way forward that hews close to the inclusive mission of our work while also addressing the elephant in the room: that AI is not going anywhere. In fact, since we put out the call for this special issue a little over a year ago, AI has started to be incorporated into all kinds of technology that students use including email, word processing, coding, LMS platforms, and more. AI, then, is becoming more intertwined in the technological ecosystems in which we work.
So, it is incumbent upon us to educate ourselves about this technology, to identify the challenges and issues with it and, I guess—yes, I am reluctant to write this even—the opportunities. Students need to understand how generative AI shapes their writing from the critical thinking and brainstorming processes to the composing and revision processes. Generative AI is not neutral. It is not infallible or even particularly accurate. Often, it is not beautiful or inspiring. It might, however, be useful in specific circumstances that we need to teach students to identify. We certainly need to engage more in discussions around AI critical literacy both in the writing center and across higher education.
This AI literacy works starts (and likely ends) in the writing center.
In the pieces that follow, there are many different engagements with Generative AI. Some, like Zieve-Cohen et al., interviewed students on their perceptions of Generative AI and their use habits in the early days of ChatGPT coming on the scene. Hartung and Sharp detail their experiences “incorporating GenAI readiness programming for instructors into [their] services.” Here, the authors try to position themselves—and the writing center—as “facilitative partners in institution-spanning conversations related to writing pedagogy and GenAI technologies.” Others, like Aikens and Weildon, surveyed their tutors to learn more about their familiarity with GenAI in order “use tutor experiences and beliefs as the basis for any activities we created.” Melody Denny uses role-playing exercises as an example of how writing center administrators can incorporate GenAI into tutor training. Denny provides scenarios for tutors-in-training to practice their tutoring practices, reflect on tutoring pedagogy, and “critically evaluate GenAI’s effectiveness as a tutor”. We also have two multimodal pieces—Wenqi Cui provides a tools demo of ResearchRabbit which “Offers a unique approach to literature mapping and citation management that can enhance research and writing processes.” Pruneda Sentíes et al. shares a talking picture book that documents how one writing center, and its staff, “reflects collectively on the transition that the arrival of [GenAI] has ignited.” Finally, there are two conversation shapers (one of our longest-running genres that handles current issues and topics in writing centers) in this issue. Theresa D’Entremont explores the challenges of pervasively underfunded writing centers and the temptation to over-rely on GenAI in lieu of in-house paid student support. Annalee Roustio uncovers the ethical challenges with GenAi tools, many of which use content scraped illegally to build their LLMS and therefore their services. Roustio raises an important challenge of this current AI age when they write: “Because of the exciting and still unknown potential GenAI holds for writing at large, we may find ourselves in somewhat of a dilemma: how can we harmonize writing center work with writing tools that may display source use widely considered impermissible?”
As this overview of pieces shows, writing center practitioners are trying to make sense of the moment when AI arrived on the scene as well as how it has (likely necessarily) irrevocably changed how we train our tutors and how we provide faculty and staff development across the university. Further, several authors are interested in hearing directly from tutors and other student writers about the impact of GenAI on them. These are the first studies of their kind to be published in the world of writing centers. While they offer a snapshot in time, they also speak to the apprehensions, moments of confusion and panic, as well as how writing center practitioners rose to the ways our field rises to the occasion (again, so soon after the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown and move to remote learning). They offer practical and empirical research to fill in the gaps in our work.
This is the first in a double issue on AI and writing centers, with the second slated to go live in spring 2025. We want to thank all of the hard work of the reviewers, copyeditors, and the contributors. Our thanks, also, as always to our web editor, Wenqi Cui, and to our grad editors, Rabail Qayyum and Andrew Yim for helping to mentor many of these authors to publication. And thanks to Joseph Cheatle for helping with the submission and feedback processes in this issue.
Special Thanks to AI Issue 9.1 and 9.2 Reviewers and Copyeditors
AI Issue Peer Reviewers:
-
Rebecca Babcock
-
Kat Bell
-
Matthew Bryan
-
Tom Deans
-
Harry Denny
-
Meaghan Dittrich
-
Joe Essid
-
Clint Gardner
-
Genie Giaimo
-
Christina Klimo
-
Elizabeth Kleinfeld
-
Dan Lawson
-
Luke Morgan
-
Roman Naghshi
-
Georganne Nordstrom
-
J.M. Paiz
-
Kim Pennesi
-
Jim Purdy
-
Kristina Reardon
-
Graham Stowe
AI Issue Copyeditors:
- Cat Baker
-
Alexandra Krasova
- Tammie Lovvorn
-
Ammar Mahmoud
- Craig Mannino
-
TPR Editorial Team