AI Realism Reclaiming the Human in AI- enhanced Academic Literacies EATAW 2025 – Braga Multilingual Academic Literacies: Challenges and Opportunities in the Age of AI by Julia Molinari

Abstract Language technologies (LTs) are not new and a life without them means many things to many people: unimaginable, impractical, unavoidable, undesirable, undemocratic, maybe even a welcome relief. LTs include the familiar (dictionaries, machine translators, spellcheckers) and now the unfamiliar, which is rapidly becoming the new normal: LLMs (Large Language Models) powered by GenAI (GenerativeAI) and, apparently, AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) are automating writing in unprecedented ways. I wish to use this talk to press pause, just for a moment, to catch our collective breaths. I would like to halt the dizzying speed at which these technologies are affecting our professional and personal existence by sharing a critical realist perspective (Archer & Maccarini, 2023) on LTs and what it means to be human (Molinari, 2025). This includes reflecting on LTs’ implications for academic literacies broadly understood as multisemiotic modes of communication, which include multilingualism (Lillis & Tuck, 2025). AI Realism entails neither techno-determinism nor techno-enthusiasm nor luddism. Rather, it provides a critical space in which to interrogate why AI has so abruptly irrupted into everyday life and how we might want to respond as educators. For example, it’s no coincidence that ChatGPT was released in the wake of the COVID19 pandemic (Hussain et al., 2024), with significant implications for the development of proctoring and surveillance technologies (McKenna, 2022). It’s also no coincidence that AI is associated with fascist ideologies (McQuillan, 2022). That it remains a black box in terms of how it is trained and by whom also raises concerns for academic writing (Gallagher, 2020). All this presents ideological challenges and opportunities for academic literacies that include, for example, re-visiting what we mean by criticality and agency if these foundational tenets of academic writing theory and practice are being deferred to GenAI. References Archer, M. S., & Maccarini, A. M. (Eds.). (2023). What is Essential to Being Human? Can AI Robots Not Share It? Routledge. Gallagher, J. R. (2020). The Ethics of Writing for Algorithmic Audiences. Computers and Composition, 57, 102583. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2020.102583 Hussain, T., Wang, D., & Li, B. (2024). The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on the adoption and impact of AI ChatGPT: Challenges, applications, and ethical considerations. Acta Psychologica, 246, 104264. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2024.104264 Lillis, T., & Tuck, J. (2025). Academic literacies: a critical lens for a global academy. McKenna, S. (2022). Neoliberalism’s conditioning effects on the university and the example of proctoring during COVID-19 and since. Journal of Critical Realism, 21(5), 502-515. https://doi.org/10.1080/14767430.2022.2100612 McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol University Press. Molinari, J. (2025). What Makes Academic Writing Human(e): a Critical Realist Response. In J. Bouchard & K. Zotzmann (Eds.), Critical Realism in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge University Press forthcoming.