Thinking Amid AI

Thinking is the practice of making meaning by bringing ideas into relation: noticing patterns, testing assumptions, contextualizing claims, and revising understanding in response to evidence and others.

Amid AI, this practice can be rushed, narrowed, or displaced. Generated language may arrive fluent and persuasive before judgment has had time to form. We help students attune to what AI makes possible, what it obscures, and what judgments they must continue to make for themselves.

AI as a Rhetorical Environment

At the Writing Center, we approach writing as a process of thinking: a practice that unfolds through uncertainty, attention, interpretation, revision, and response. Writing has traditionally preserved that process in written form, but the deeper work of writing begins well before words settle on the page. It happens when readers dwell with difficulty, when speakers test ideas aloud, when writers revise their claims in response to evidence, and when thinkers remain open to their understanding changing.

AI can generate language, imitate genres, summarize information, and suggest possible directions for inquiry. But it cannot replace the situated work of making meaning: reading carefully, listening generously, bearing uncertainty, attuning to others, and deciding what one actually thinks.

We therefore approach AI as a rhetorical environment: a context that shapes how language is produced, circulated, received, and evaluated. Working well with AI requires more than technical skill. It requires attunement to what AI accelerates, what it obscures, what it makes easier to imagine, and what it cannot know.

AI, Attunement, and Agency

We support students in engaging AI as a tool for inquiry rather than as a substitute for interpretation, creativity, or judgment. In these consultations, we help students remain intellectually engaged in their encounters with AI-generated language.

Attunement means slowing down before accepting, rejecting, or using an AI response. It means asking what kind of language this is, what it seems to know, what it cannot know, and what forms of human judgment it may be inviting the writer to surrender. It also means noticing what the generated response makes easier to imagine and what it makes harder to perceive.

Together, we might ask: What is this response doing? What assumptions does it make? What does it leave out? What would count as evidence here? What forms of knowledge, experience, or disciplinary judgment are missing? Where/why/how does this response flatten ambiguity, disagreement, or difference?

We also guide students to think critically about the systems behind AI: how these tools are built, what forms of labor and data they depend on, what kinds of authority they claim, and how they may reproduce existing inequities. Our goal is to help students preserve agency over their own intellectual work.

Think with Us

In Thinking Amid AI consultations, we treat AI outputs as rhetorical material: language to be read, questioned, situated, challenged, and revised. We might use AI to generate possible questions, counterarguments, alternate structures, or unfamiliar perspectives. We might also close read an AI response to identify moments of insight, overgeneralization, omission, uncertainty, or misplaced confidence. Our purpose is not simply to get better answers from AI, but to develop better judgment in relation to it.

AI cannot participate in situated, reciprocal acts of listening, questioning, disagreement, care, and collaborative meaning-making. Writing Center consultations provide a human space where ideas can be tested, complicated, and revised in conversation. We help students engage AI rhetorically so that they leave with stronger habits of attention, interpretation, attunement, and intellectual agency. To make an appointment, please visit WCOnline.