Brent Lucia’s research while affiliated with University of Connecticut and other places

The advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 catalyzed a wave of excitement and apprehension, but especially fear. This article examines the dystopian narratives that emerged after ChatGPT’s release date. Through a critical analysis of media responses, we uncover how dystopian imaginaries discussing ChatGPT become rhetorically constructed in popular, journalistic discourse. The article locates prevalent anxieties surrounding ChatGPT’s unprecedented text-generation capabilities, and identifies recurrent fears regarding academic integrity, the proliferation of misinformation, ethical dilemmas in human-AI interaction, and the perpetuation of social biases. Moreover, the article introduces the concept of ‘fear cycles’ – recurring patterns of dystopian projections in response to emerging technologies. By documenting and dissecting these fear cycles, we offer insights into the underlying rhetorical features that drive societal reactions to technological advancements. The research ultimately contributes to a nuanced understanding of how ChatGPT dystopian imaginaries develop particular futures, while grounding the present in predictable anxieties related to technological innovation.

Guided by the scholarly understanding of generative artificial intelligence, this study explores technical writing students’ engagement with ChatGPT during their writing process. This study is informed by the classical five canons of rhetoric, along with the contemporary reinterpretations of the canons. Employing a qualitative analysis of interviews, this study argues that the students’ engagement with ChatGPT allows for reframing and expanding the notions of the writing process and rhetorical canons in the previous literature.

This paper explores the potential of a ‘more-than-digital’ view toward agency and authorship in the postdigital era. By examining students’ narratives of their interactions with ChatGPT, this research contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversation on the relationship between humans and AI in educational contexts. This study explores college undergraduate students’ perceptions of agency and authorship through an AI-assisted research writing project. Employing a narrative analysis, this paper argues that students adopt a fair position toward their use of ChatGPT during the writing process, a standpoint that allows for addressing the tendency to assign objects’ or machines’ influence solely to human perceptions and the issue of granting excessive authority to objects or machines. We conclude this paper with pedagogical implications for fostering a ‘more-than-digital’ approach to critical AI literacy. Moreover, the paper offers implications for the future research of AI-assisted writing projects, with a focus on the thoughtful integration of AI technologies to foster critical literacy among college students.

Use these categories and questions to guide discussions at the level of the classroom, department, and discipline.

Ethical frameworks for text generators (TGs) in education are generally concerned with person-alized instruction, a dependency on data, biases in training data, academic integrity, and lack of creativity from students. While broad-level, institutional guidelines provide value in understanding the ethical dimensions of artificial intelligence (AI) for the classroom, there is a need for a more ecological understanding of how AI ethics might be constructed locally, one that takes into account the negotiation of AI between teacher and student. This article investigates how an educational ethical framework for AI use emerges through a qualitative case study of one composition student's interaction with and understanding of using ChatGPT as a type of writing partner. Analysis of interview data and student logs uncover what we term an emergent "local ethic"-a framework that is capable of exploring unique ethical considerations, values, and norms that develop at the most foundational unit of higher education-the individual classroom. Our framework is meant to provide a heuristic for other writing teacher-scholars as they interrogate issues related to pedagogy, student criticality, agency, reliability, and access within the context of powerful AI systems.

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, privacy, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its social power. While certain artifacts attempt to confront the prevailing narrative related to privacy, such discourse is often ineffectively rooted in cyber-libertarian ideology. In order to more effectively challenge Meta’s social power, future critical discourse should be 1) more holistically deployed and 2) cognizant of the logics of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this paper considers the rhetorical strategies and functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse, while also acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this paper investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (n=428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, privacy, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its social power. While certain artifacts attempt to confront the prevailing narrative related to privacy, such discourse is often ineffectively rooted in cyber-libertarian ideology. In order to more effectively challenge Meta’s social power, future critical discourse should be 1) more holistically deployed and 2) cognizant of the logics of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this paper considers the rhetorical strategies and functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse, while also acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.

As immersive technology grows in popularity, universities are developing academic innovation labs (AIL) that often introduce students to virtual reality (VR) and other emerging cross reality applications. Although these labs help educate students on emerging technology, a more critical eye is needed to examine user experience (UX). This article reports on a qualitative, multimethod study that employed a talk-aloud UX protocol to gather data on VR users’ experience at the University of Connecticut’s OPIM Research Lab. To fully define and contrast this data, we juxtapose these individual narratives with rhetorical analysis of marketing discourse, as presented by VR platform HTC Vive, Google’s VR application Tilt Brush, and the Research Lab’s promotional material. Based on our findings, we assert that sociotechnical imaginaries as constructed by promotional material often reduce the complexities of immersion in user experience. Such marketing rhetoric creates “top-down” imaginaries that contrast with “bottom-up” imaginaries generated in user experience, reinforcing the complex and fluid definitions of immersion. The resulting study has practical implications for stakeholders across higher education, especially in the context of innovation labs, as well as for technical and professional communication educators and practitioners.

Despite pushback from regulatory and non-governmental entities, Meta’s control over the public narrative remains consistent. Using a method of corpus analysis, this study investigated the company’s sociotechnical imaginary as it circulates in media artifacts (428) responding to Zuckerberg’s 2021 Metaverse announcement. Analysis of how these artifacts respond to issues related to identity, security, and connectivity revealed that the majority amplify Meta’s corporate messaging, empowering its elite discourse and solidifying its socio-technological power. As it relates to user privacy, however, this study uncovered a limited number of artifacts in which journalists challenged rather than repeated Meta’s rhetoric. As an implication of this finding, future tech journalism should consider privacy as a starting point for critiques that also interrogate the underlying logic of surveillance capitalism and user exploitation. Ultimately, this article addresses the rhetorical functions deployed in the circulation of elite discourse while acknowledging the dynamism of sociotechnical imaginaries.