Dear Gemini: Agency, Peer Review, and Critical AI Literacies in Student Writing Ecologies

Abstract

This article examines how students conceptualize their relationships with generative AI in a 2024 pilot study of the PAIRR (Peer and AI Review + Reflection) model and an ongoing larger study in 2025. This experimental, equity-driven model intends to build critical AI literacies and increase support for students’ writing processes through discussion of readings about AI, peer review and AI-generated feedback on student drafts, and critical reflection on both kinds of feedback. To frame PAIRR's approach, we offer a critique of marketing narratives that conceptualize AI as an assistant that renders writing effortless. Drawing on writing studies research and best practices in writing instruction, we highlight how such portrayals undermine writing's social, iterative, and identity-forming nature. Using an ecological framework, we analyze the roles, analogies, and metaphors that students applied, and occasionally invented, to describe their relationship to the chatbot, which often situated ChatGPT on the periphery of their writing process. While AI is aggressively marketed to students, universities themselves are making AI platforms available to students free of charge. In this context, writing instruction must systematically challenge marketing narratives, which misconstrue the task of writing, by prioritizing students’ agency.