In this discussion-based workshop, we think with John Warner’s provocation that “If AI can do it, we shouldn’t be teaching it.” How should we think about writing at the university level if we believe it is still worth doing, even though Large Language Model-based text prediction programs exist? Taking the approach that writing is a practice of thinking, we’ll investigate how to practice this idea. Chatbots may be able to quickly string together grammatically correct sentences and structured paragraphs, but this doesn’t mean we can or should turn the practice of writing over to them. Appearances to the contrary, chatbots aren’t thinking, and writing is not primarily something we do to produce a written product. In this discussion, we will consider some existential and practical approaches to thinking about writing-as-thinking in today’s university contexts.

Bio: Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. Her current projects investigate how we might understand, bear witness, and respond to unjust histories and complex presents with an eye toward creating different futures. A professor at Carleton University, on unceded Algonquin land, she is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, and Liberation is Other People (forthcoming 2026).