Authoring dialogic identities in collaboration with AI

Chris Proctor<br>
2026 AI and Data Science Symposium, UB<br>
September 25, 2026

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**Framing**
  - Writing with AI is dialogic
  - Three authorial roles

**Design**
  - Design-based research and conjecture map
  - AI affordances in Unfold Studio

**Two cases**: Dragonbaby and Quaezae, a year on

**Discussion**
  - AI as a platform and a medium
  - Schools as laboratories
]

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# Writing with AI is dialogic

Writing is dialogic: meaning emerges through interaction among multiple voices; our words carry histories.cite[1].
Identity is a self one authors and occupies within a literacy practice.cite[2]. Writer's workshop pedagogy cultivates authorial identity: students write as authors with something to say to their peers.cite[3]

Writing with AI changes the dialogic situation:
- AI models **culture and discourse**, not just language
- AI carries **language ideologies** around social position and genre .cite[4]
- Students' authorial identities become entangled with the voices of AI

.refs[
.anchor[1] Bakhtin, 1981
.anchor[2] Holland et al., 1998; Moje & Luke, 2009
.anchor[3] Dorn & Soffos, 2001
.anchor[4] Irvine & Gal, 2000; Proctor & Rish, 2025
]

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# Three authorial roles

Three authorial roles .cite[1]:

- **Animator** — gives voice to words; inscribes them on the page
- **Author** — selects the sentiments and ideas
- **Principal** — is committed to; stands behind what the words say

These roles explain why AI feels acceptable in some contexts and fraudulent in others:

- AI-generated greeting card
- AI-generated eulogy
- AI-generated student essay

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# Design:<br>Unfold Studio

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# Design-based research

You can't study a new technology apart from the activity system it enters; the technology's effects are highly nonlinear.

DBR develops theory and explores a design space through iterative cycles.cite[1].

**Conjecture:** dialogic identity matters for collaborating with AI, and for understanding that collaboration.

**Iterations:** Unfold Studio.cite[2] → AI affordances.cite[3] → ten-week writing club (spring 2025) → follow-up interviews (2026)

.refs[
.anchor[1] Cobb et al., 2003; Sandoval, 2014
.anchor[2] Proctor & Blikstein, 2019
.anchor[3] Proctor & Bhatt, 2026
]

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# Conjecture map

<div style="display:flex;align-items:stretch;gap:1em;margin-top:2em;font-size:0.9em;">
<div style="flex:1;border:2px solid currentColor;padding:0.75em;">
<strong>Design</strong><br>
<em>Declarative narrative</em>: AI affordances in Unfold Studio for explicit, bounded delegation of detail, plot, and character
</div>
<div style="align-self:center;font-size:2em;">→</div>
<div style="flex:1;border:2px solid currentColor;padding:0.75em;">
<strong>Mediating processes</strong><br>
Delegating and withholding the roles of animator, author, and principal; negotiating voice with AI
</div>
<div style="align-self:center;font-size:2em;">→</div>
<div style="flex:1;border:2px solid currentColor;padding:0.75em;">
<strong>Outcomes</strong><br>
Students author dialogic identities in relation to AI
</div>
</div>

<p style="margin-top:1.5em;">Writer's workshop (sharing stories with peers; craft mini-lessons) is the context for the whole map.</p>

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# AI affordances in Unfold Studio

Each affordance lets the author **delegate a literary element** to AI, keeping the collaboration explicit and bounded:

- **`generate`** delegates *sensory detail*: AI writes a passage, then control returns to the story
- **`continue`** delegates *plot*: an open-ended exchange with the reader, which AI steers toward a scripted target
- **`agent`** delegates *character*: AI speaks in the voice of a character modeled by a sub-story

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# Two cases

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# Dragonbaby

- 9th grader, writing with her 12th-grade sister; avid readers of fantasy and fan-fiction writers
- **No prior experience with generative AI**
- *"Our actions have consequences"*: fan-fiction set in Percy Jackson, with a scratch-pad story, *"Worlds collide"*
- Unit of analysis: Dragonbaby. Her sister and the fan-fiction practice are the context in which her identity is authored

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# Dragonbaby: Trajectory

**During the workshop:** the AI *knew her fandom*. She and her sister geeked out over Percy Jackson lore in an AI-shaped fan-fiction practice, and she kept replaying the story.

**A year later:** delight has become negotiated craft.

> AI can be very finicky. You have to keep specifying over and over exactly who's in the scene... otherwise it gives a weird answer that makes no sense in context.

> It kept putting them either in the wrong spot or jumping ahead of where I'd said.

**Identity:** she remains the author and owner of her story, and is now an experienced author of *AI-entangled* fan fiction, one who knows the limits of her collaborator.

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# Quaezae

- 10th grader; worked alone; first programming, built a shopping simulation
- Opposed to AI: *"AI is ruining my friends' minds"*; used it only on friends' phones
- Invited to experiment in order to be better-informed in her opposition. She wrote *"Tellers"*, a dystopia where AI chips are required to participate in society

> In this world, it's been completely accepted, or more accurately... **integrated.**

- Asked the reader's *name* and injected it into AI prompts, putting you in dialogue with AI against your will
- Two endings: implant the chip ("The Good Ending," sarcastically) or reject it and be excluded

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# Quaezae: Trajectory

**A year later:** the stance is unchanged, but the grounds have hardened from feeling into argument.

> I have not touched AI one bit... I write everything myself, all my essays.

> I wouldn't put my own name into AI.

Why AI can't be a co-author:

> A computer generated its own thoughts about a book that it didn't read, because it's not real, it's a computer.

**Identity:** she refuses to grant AI standing as a principal, yet expects to be *forced* to use it. "Tellers" dramatizes exactly that.

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# Discussion

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# Conjecture: Dialogic identity

Dialogic identity matters for collaborating with AI, and for understanding that collaboration.

- **Dragonbaby** is entangled with AI through craft and fandom
- **Quaezae** is entangled with AI through refusal

Questions about AI (efficacy, ethics, and more) are questions about ourselves: AI is becoming part of us, not something outside of us.

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# AI as a platform and a medium

Literacy practices at every scale are bound up with the technological infrastructure 
which enables them.cite[2]. AI is widespread and uniquely intimate.

Figure: axes of literacies.cite[1]

Educators and researchers need to be **designing** AI interfaces—not just adopting them.

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# Schools as laboratories for<br>new literacies

Two models of literacy .cite[1, 2]:

- **Autonomous model**: literacy is a universal and inherently empowering skillset. It is our duty to give literacy to those who lack it. 
- **Ideological model**: literacies are specific social practices embedded in identites, communities, media, and power relations. 
  Literacies *can* be powerful in the right circumstances.

We don't know how AI will be powerful for today's youth. Dragonbaby and Quaezae found very different answers. Schools should be laboratories for discovering new practices, not for prescribing how to use AI.

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Chris Proctor<br>
2026 AI and Data Science Symposium, UB<br>
September 25, 2026