In composition classrooms, generative AI is still often framed in terms of misuse: will students cheat, become dependent, or make grading harder? A student sits down to write an essay and opens a generative AI tool. What happens next depends less on the tool itself than on the role the student gives it. In one version, the student asks for a full draft, copies what appears, changes a few words, and submits the result as if the writing emerged from their own composing process. The AI’s labor disappears, and the student’s decision-making becomes difficult to trace. In another version, the…
Author: Manuel Gonzalez Velasco
Manuel Gonzalez Velasco
Manuel Gonzalez Velasco is a PhD student in English at Wayne State University, specializing in Rhetoric and Composition with an emphasis on generative AI in post-secondary writing education. His research explores how students and instructors negotiate AI-assisted writing, authorship, rhetorical agency, and ethical co-authorship in composition classrooms. He also studies Dark Academia as a rhetorical and pedagogical phenomenon, especially how aesthetic cultures shape ideas about scholarship, legitimacy, productivity, and belonging. Outside of his academic writing, he runs The Rhetoric Diaries, a YouTube channel where he documents his PhD journey, teaching life, research, and experiences as a first-generation scholar.