Writing and/as Knowledge Production
These questions of responsibility, ethics, and the social actions of genre – questions of how we learn and work with integrity – are core elements of being a scholar and professional. The decisions we make and the knowledge we produce in our research, teaching, and work shape the world: for example, they inform government policy, create health and safety standards, update protections for patients, and change public attitudes about representation in cultural texts such as films and advertisements. Because what we do as scholars – including student-scholars – is so consequential, it is essential that our scholarship can be trusted to uphold the expectations that it produced in appropriate conditions: doing no harm to others in the process, not under the influence of external agents, acknowledging existing work in the field, and representing data and interpretations with accuracy.
When students join institutions of higher education, they become part of the community of scholars and professionals, and the work students do – even in their courses – needs to meet these expectations of integrity. Through course assignments, we ask student-scholars to demonstrate that they can demonstrate the learning required of the course, because that learning reflects understanding or skills that someone in that field must have.
Generative AI is a tool that we need to understand in order to use with integrity – incorporating it into our developing expertise, without relinquishing our ability to understand, evaluate, and be responsible for the work it produces for or with us. Ultimately, GAI can and might lighten the load of a particular task or project, but when we decide to use it – as with any other tool we might incorporate into our learning and professional practices – we remain accountable for the work that it does in our name. As Sarah Elaine Eaton (2023) notes, “Humans can relinquish control, but not responsibility.” We therefore have the agency and the responsibility as consumers and producers of knowledge to cultivate the ethical practices that will allow us to learn, work, engage, and write with integrity.
