Toward a ‘More-Than-Digital’ AI Literacy: Reimagining Agency and Authorship in the Postdigital Era with ChatGPT

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.