Just Don’t Let the Spin Get You Down: On Surviving and Navigating AI While the World is on Fire

When NPR’s Tonya Mosley interviewed the New York Times’s Kashmir Hill on Fresh Air for a story titled “What happens when artificial intelligence quietly reshapes our lives,” she mentions a professor who is “really in the middle of an existential crisis over AI,” and she was referring to yours truly. Not in a “yes, that’s me! I relate to that too!” way where we identify with someone being interviewed or mentioned in a media piece, but literally. I am the professor friend she mentions who teaches writing and is in that state of crisis over where we are in the ascendance, and now dominance, of AI being thrown at and into every aspect of our lives.

Since we’ve begun to confront these challenges in PWR and in education more broadly, I’ve been sitting for a good while with what is a wild and bitter irony to me: that we’ve all been considering possible uses for generative tools and other types of AI at the same time that these tools and systems are being leveraged in the worst attacks on higher education as we’ve seen in our lifetimes. And of course these tools have been used heavily in attacks on government, attacks on the most vulnerable people in our society, and in some ways even on democracy and democratic possibility itself. To put it differently, the usual worries we hear about potential student cheating and shortcut-taking are at or near bottom of the list of problems that trouble me with the ascendance and looming dominance of the various kinds of tools and systems that get bundled up under the label of “artificial intelligence.” These tools are extractive. They have fundamentally changed our relationships with copyright and intellectual property in ways that aren’t anywhere near reciprocal. As CCCC Chair Jennifer Sano-Franchini put it in her 2025 Chairs Address, these tools put users in a subservient position, and they often produce wrong and even harmful outputs, with a very confident, assertive tone. If you’re interested in following more from people in Writing Studies who have staked out critical and even resistant postures on AI, you can follow the research/working group Sano-Franchini is a part of, “Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies.”

But even all of those problems aren’t the ones that are top of mind for me in this era. Because of our Star Trek lore in the program, I might say that AI has achieved Borg-like status, telling us at every turn of product launches and seemingly every tech company CEO public comment that resistance really is futile. We will all be assimilated. To step away from Trek though and into a different metaphor (because this would lead me down a very long rabbit hole about how the Discovery and Picard series treat AI and then this post would then be wayyyy too long), I often find myself feeling like not only is the world on fire, but that we’re being asked to make friends with the arsonists.

As far along as I might be in my own existential brooding (on this issue I’m somewhere between my usual Charlie Brown personality and Eeyore, but not quite Eeyoring yet), I am still somehow clear on what all of this means for us and the program as we move forward. No matter where the university lands on a continuum from acceptance to enthusiasm, and no matter what student attitudes we might be forced to contend with, I want PWR to be an intellectual space where inquiry, critique, and even resistance continue to be significant elements of our collective response from our overall vision to course offerings to pedagogy in our required courses and to the space we make for each other as colleagues in community.

As you have heard from me on other occasions, my desire to lift up these values or positions is not exclusionary: I know that (informed) use, experimentation, and innovation with these tools and systems are all still important. In fact, the range of our thinking about these issues across the program is a major source of my confidence in us as an intellectual and teaching community despite my own internal malaise. I also know that no matter what pressures generative tools will exert on scholarly and public discourse, and on writing, reading, speaking and listening, the campus and those with whom we connect beyond the campus will need far more of what we do, and not less. I say this for several reasons: because generative AI isn’t good (yet? won’t ever be?) for the qualities and abilities we care most about in our teaching, and because the continued insertion of these tools into more and more aspects of our lives means people will become more reliant on them, and most important, because predictive tools are not and never will be designed to deal with the messy and unpredictable elements of growing as strategic, ethical, thoughtful communicators. For all of these reasons and more, I believe they are ancillary at best and harmful distractions at worst for the kinds of human engagement that writing and speaking require. As Rev. Solomon Missouri says—in one of my favorite Bluesky threads ever—“the work is the people. AI can’t love the people.” His thread is in response to a New York Times article taking up the question of whether AI has a place in the pulpit, assisting preachers with their work, and I think that a secular version of it encapsulates so much of what I believe about speaking, about writing, and about why Rhetoric was the interdisciplinary intellectual space that helped me see graduate study and an academic career as being worth the pursuit.

When Marvin and I attended the VPUE Cabinet Retreat last month, I was asked to say something as part of a panel about AI and teaching. I shared a few of the thoughts you see here, and I ended with a few provocations that I hope you’ll find worth considering as we continue with the crucial work we do:

·      AI (now) and tech generally (for ages) have operated as a kind of American civil religion, and should be interrogated as such.

·      Because technologies are thoroughly rhetorical and because writing is always technologized, communication technologies have to be a site of critical inquiry throughout the undergraduate education experience. What I would say to my STS students is that we need careful attention to the mutually constitutive relationships between humans and their technologies, and this is especially so in the case of AI.

·      We need a much richer sense of student and instructor uses of, attitudes toward, and perspectives on generative tools (in and out of academic contexts), and we need to be able to track them over time. I’m hoping that VPUE and/or the university will commit to this kind of *ongoing* research, at minimum through a significant annual survey.

·      Part of the logic that makes generative AI so appealing involves a privileging of speed, efficiency, and scale. I believe we need to be intentional about creating spaces in the program for students and ourselves that resist this logic. We need to offer students space to slow down in a ridiculously intense Stanford culture; we need the long read, the long listen, and sometimes even the meandering path through intellectual and community challenges; and we need to remember that something we create that speaks to 1 person or 5 or 25 is every bit as necessary as something an app creator hopes will serve thousands or millions.

·      Something specific to the program: I hope that we will be able to offer sections of PWR 1 and PWR 2 as explicitly AI free zones, where both instructors and students commit to growth as researchers and communicators without using these tools. If I were a different type of academic, I’d want to run a study of such an effort to see how students and instructors experience such an effort and how it influences their research, speaking and writing processes. Maybe that’s a study someone else might want to pursue (and one that I’d support in any ways I can). I’d like to imagine ways we could do the same for our lecturers who want to play with, bend, break and see what’s possible with generative tools as well.

While I haven’t yet figured out how I’d like to be in ongoing, long-term conversation with you as the people who PWR PWR, I do know that I want to create an informal, low-stakes space for us to read together and think together, taking the time we need despite how quickly everything around us seems to be moving. Many of you already know that Donny Hathaway is my favorite artist of allllll tiiiiiiime; the opening to his classic “Someday We’ll All Be Free” sits with me as I think about the speed and intensity of everything in this moment: “Hang on to the world as it spins around/Just don’t let the spin get you down/Things are moving fast/Hold on tight and you will last.” What I hope we’ll hang on to in this madness is slowing down where we can despite the speed and intensity of everything around us, and to community both in the program and off campus.