Advanced multi-lingual writers’ self-directed use of generative AI in academic writing: Rethinking writing, authorship, and learning

Abstract This study explores the self-directed use of Generative AI (GenAI) in academic writing among advanced L2/multi-lingual English writers, challenging the assumption that GenAI undermines meaningful learning. Through case studies, we investigate how three (post)doctoral writers engage with GenAI to address specific L2 writing challenges. The findings revealed a spectrum of approaches to GenAI, ranging from prescriptive to dialogic uses, with participants positioning AI as a tool versus an interactive participant in their meaning-making process, reflecting different views of AI as a mechanical system, social construct, or distributed agency. We highlight the ways AI disrupts traditional notions of authorship, text, and learning, showing how a post-structuralist lens allows us to transcend human-AI, writing-technology, and learning-bypassing binaries in our existing discourses on AI. This shifting view allows us to deconstruct and reconstruct AI’s multi-faceted possibilities in writers’ literacy practices. We also call for more nuanced ethical considerations to avoid stigmatizing multi-lingual writers’ use of GenAI and to foster writerly virtues that reposition our relationship with AI technology.