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Following Conversations: To Chat(GPT) or not to Chat(GPT)
Introduction
Increasingly, there has been an ever-blooming bouquet of discourse surrounding generative AI (genAI) writing tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and their place in the academy, particularly within writing classrooms. Points of interest in these conversations range from dystopian murmurings of sentient LLMs being able to replace writing teachers– breeding concern about things like job security and subject matter expertise concerning legislation, institutional policy, and curriculum– to pedagogical questions about the degree to which genAI-based tools belong in writing classrooms altogether. These conversations are packed with pedagogical nuances and raise questions about authorship, academic dishonesty, assessment, and even what qualifies something as writing, creating a space for us to think about writing processes and course goals more closely (Vee). I am interested in leveraging these recent conversations about the integration of genAI into our classrooms to explore the numerous benefits doing so may have for disabled students, particularly neurodivergent student writers (NDSW) with ADHD. Particular components of the writing process like drafting, scaffolding, and revision, often neglect to consider the specific needs of neurodiverse learners that are informed by the ways we experience time, absorb information, draft and compose, and even embody class spaces (Hubrig and Barritt), and many of these components require the use of cognitive processes and executive functions that ADHD learners struggle with. Such executive dysfunctions related to information processing, organization, temporality, motivation and initiation, affect the ways we engage with and carry out most tasks. I draw from existing Writing Studies research about neurodivergent writers, and my own experience as a disabled PhD student and instructor with diagnosed ADHD, to demonstrate some of the affordances genAI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Whisper (an automatic speech recognition transcription tool) have to help better support ADHD writers. I’ll articulate how genAI functions as an equitable tool to support ADHD writers with writing related tasks that are difficult for them because of the symptoms and executive dysfunctions they experience, by automating various parts of the writing process– a set of various nonlinear actions and iterations of brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and sharing.
Further, we as writing instructors can leverage the recent discourse about genAI-based writing technologies to consider the ways the genAI landscape requires the modification and revision of our own pedagogical moves and objectives and prompts us to examine who they’re working for. The affordances I point to help us consider the ways in which the contextualization of genAI tools as a welcomed intervention for ADHD students promote the centralization of accessibility in our courses, simultaneously answering a call to re-examine our pedagogical practices and who they’re working for. While there is an increasing amount of work about both the capabilities of genAI technologies and cautionary perspectives regarding environmental and pedagogical risks associated with genAI use, there is less work about the benefits of genAI as writing tools for disabled students, particularly NDSW with ADHD. I affirm that we should rely on disciplinary knowledge and continue to carefully think about the risks and responsibilities involved with committing to the use of genAI to any degree as Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Megan McIntyre, and Maggie Fernandes so thoughtfully outline in their guide “Refusing GenAI in Writing Studies: A QuickStart Guide.” It is important to think just as carefully about the affordances and benefits embracing such technologies can have for neurodiverse students.
This exigency is in part impelled by the lack of Writing Studies scholarship about NDSW and their writing processes, and identifies the need for supplemental empirical research where Critical Disability Studies intersects with computation and writing. Data about NDSW and their engagement with the writing process is limited, and existing research about NDSW often groups together the experiences of students with autism, ADHD, and other types of neurodivergences. While there are overlapping symptoms that may lead to shared writing-related experiences between them, it is important that we also work with these populations individually to better understand both the shared and unique experiences of each group. For the sake of this article, given my own experience as an ADHD learner, I will focus primarily on writing process related to ADHD writers, in order to avoid minimizing or misrepresenting the experiences of people with other forms of neurodivergence.