Kimberly A. Bain
Palm Beach Atlantic University
2025
In the age of widespread sharing of information, students may see generative AI practices as just another tool to develop their academic work. Friend (2016) notes that “To talk about ethics in a way that informs current practice in our discipline thus requires a complete reconfiguration of ethics in response to postmodern precepts (p. 549). Situating ethics in the context of student writing practices means considering its new technology that has reimagined its concept. In centering students in the arguments surrounding ethical AI use, Rossi (2019) notes “such a powerful technology also raises some concerns, such as its ability to make important decisions in a way that humans would perceive as fair” (p.128). Ethics no longer has solely human implications, but those that give technology a place in the discussion. To engage students in concepts of ethics in argumentation, I apply the 2023 New York Times vs. OpenAI civil case and its reflections to the analysis of various news articles in my Advanced Composition course. This course mainly serves upper-division English, pre-law, and political science majors who focus on the analysis and development of rhetorical applications to argumentative writing, particularly within the legal field. Through this analysis, students identify rhetorical practices of strategic framing of information through a double-lens analysis of ethical practices of handling information.
While ethical considerations of writing often exist in an academic vacuum for students, identifying ways that ethics are re-envisioned allows students to see how socially constructed rhetoric is. Friend (2016) notes that “Imparting values to students and shaping the processes through which they communicate them are connected but not equivalent problems. To talk about them as though they are is to conflate the ethical stance as an end product with the process by which it is arrived and put to use” (p. 553). Teaching ethics in the writing classroom goes beyond having students simply identify the value of ethical writing practices. Understanding these ethical concepts also requires the ability to communicate those values to various audiences through learned writing practices of argumentation.
To understand how ethics is defined and communicated through argument, students must be given applicable examples within social contexts. Outside of any academic policy, global and commercial institutions seek to define ethical frameworks of AI use in communication practices. In its principles, Google AI (2018) defines these ethical uses as that of “Promoting privacy and security, and respecting intellectual property rights.” Furthermore, IBM (2022) argues for “AI transparency, meaning everyone involved should be aware of what data is collected, how it’s used and stored, and who has access to it.” Exposing students to practical implications of their academic writing practices, helps enrich students’ classroom experience by establishing connections between what they learn and the effects of that learning.
In Slyck’s (1997) discussion, the idea of getting students to think of the ethical concerns of their writing practices means investigating the following questions:
What is the responsibility of the individual to the community? In looking at any cultural practice, what is worth holding onto? What, ethically, should be questioned, challenged, rejected? Such moments of "cultural crisis," in both writing and literature classes, have made me see that we have work to do in understanding how our students position themselves, that is, how they recognize, define, and respond to cultural conflicts…(p.151).
Slyck’s questions point out the need for students to be able to see their academic practices as a larger practice in their community. The “cultural crisis” that questions ethical shifts must be grappled with as students apply AI to their writing practices. Having students respond to cultural conflicts helps them center their work in the context of others. Mary Louis Pratt (1991) mentions similar instances of contact zones of cultural crisis that connect the classroom to the world. Pratt (1991) reflects on this exposure by stating that in contact zones, “No one was excluded, and no one was safe” (p.39). This lack of safety allows students to see the ecological effects of their learning practices. Similarly, contact zones can be engaged when teaching students about ethical uses of generative AI in writing practices, all students must see themselves as part of the bigger ethical implications of society.
Gleaning from Pratt’s (1991) pedagogical experiences, I have had the opportunity to expose students in my Advanced Composition course to similar contact zones. At the start of the course, students discussed the idea of AI-generated writing practices and the ways these tools helped develop their academic work. It became clear that until students were exposed to the contact zone of a legal court case The New York Times vs. OpenAI, they had seen their use of AI as purely transactional, and not ethical.
The New York Times vs. OpenAI case has been analyzed by various outlets such as NPR and the Harvard Law Review. It has become one of the most publicized cases to address the current issues of AI use in writing practices. In examining argumentative elements of the case, one can see that those who consider the ethics of academic integrity can identify with the New York Times in protecting their information and valuing its authors. However, in Advanced Composition, there were many who took the stance of OpenAI’s position of unrestricted access to information. Through the view of this case, students were able to see how both sides cultivated ethical frameworks by which to argue their points. Students were able to understand ethical concepts of AI use, beyond a transactional measure to aid in their academic work.
As Chetwynd (2024) notes, the conversations that students will now be prepared for is the conversation around how to use AI, rather than if to use it. In an effort to interrogate a more rhetorically situated conversation around the ethics of AI use that students can reflect on, I implemented artifacts of the civil complaint filed by the New York Times on December 27th, 2023, in which the New York Times issued statements against OpenAI and its affiliates demonstrating that the OpenAI, a generative AI company associated with Microsoft Corporation, was using copyrighted material from the New York Times in its large language models to create generative AI output (responses) without prior authorization. New York Times considered the compromises to “standards of accuracy and fairness” as a large consideration for its company in challenging the “wide scale copying” mechanisms that OpenAI uses to source its information, compromising the ethical integrity of information distribution and authorship. Students needed to understand how both entities were building ethical frameworks to develop their positions. This allowed students to consider themselves as active participants in their AI use in writing.
In examining how ethical frameworks of writing are reenvisioned through these practices, Chetwynd (2024) notes the following:
The use of AI is not black and white but a continuum. Within the process of researching and publishing research, most authors already use programs that include the use of AI, such as the grammatical corrections that are typically a part of any writing software. The question is not whether to use the technology we now have access to, but where the line needs to be drawn between use and misuse—and, once we have used the technology, how we can agree to communicate about its use in ways that are responsible, ethical, and transparent (p. 212).
The New York Times vs. OpenAI filing clearly identifies the concerns that many face with understanding what AI use means to writers’ identities as authors. In considering how ethics can contextualize the rhetorical situation in composition practices, Henning (2011) argues that “If we engage students in the process of identifying values and relating them to a specific situation, such as a rhetorical situation, we are engaging students in both critical thinking and ethical inquiry” (p. 34). When students can see a clear instance of ethics at play and at the same time ethically challenging practices of framing through the addressing of those instances, they can really engage in conversations about how ethics is both a learned and practiced experience.
In my Advanced Composition course, which focuses on advanced rhetorical practices of argumentation, students spend a great deal of time understanding the rhetorical appeal to ethics and how it can be communicated through composition. The appeal to ethics is its own unit in which students apply case studies and writing pieces that analyze the power of rhetorical appeal in argumentative practices. In the spring of 2025, I taught a section of Advanced Composition for pre-law students that focused on argumentative practices of legal documents and writings on legal issues. Using a current and ongoing court case centralized the ethical moment which students could easily situate themselves in. As students were challenged by the framing practices of each side’s argument, they were confronted with rhetorical practices that could shift a cultural moment. When students can disseminate real scenarios of framing to address clear consequences of prioritizing, moving, removing, or manipulating information, concepts of ethics move from the abstract to the practical through the analysis of a scenario that allows them to reflect on their own writing practices.
My goal through the activities in this course was not to dissuade students from using AI by bringing in the ethical concern of a court filing, but rather to expose them to the weight of ethics in argumentation. Getting students to think beyond the classroom itself promises them that their voices and practices do matter. The decisions they make and the ethics they hold mean more than a transactional academic move. Rather, they have more implications for the type of value that they hold within their own ethical frameworks.
Through critical analysis, students can analyze various reports on the court filing to identify the framing practices of the argument on both sides. News reports apply rhetorical moves through visual and textual lenses to generate an argument for or against the unauthorized use of sharing information that OpenAI is being accused of. By using rhetorical moves to frame information for readers, these reports raise questions their own questions of information mishandling. According to Phillips (2019), “Frames therefore work in a similar way to Kenneth Burke’s (1969) concept of terministic screens. Burke (1969) argued that individuals can represent issues differently based on what aspects they (whether consciously or unconsciously) highlight, de-emphasize, or ignore in their language” (p.155). This representation becomes particularly skewed when considering the article put out by NPR on January 14th, 2025, titled, “'The New York Times' takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT's future could be on the line.” The featured image displayed at the top of the article is that of a display of the New York Times physical sign. At first glance, it may appear that this image has been randomly selected as a stock image, relevant to the theme of the article. However, by looking through a critical lens, students are prompted to consider patterns of identification that exist when images are prioritized in multimodal discourse.
Students are to consider critical questions of rhetorical framing such as:
These questions challenge students not only to consider the argument of the news piece, but also to consider the subtle visual and textual, rhetorical moves that are used to persuade the reader. In assessing patterns of identification in the visual, Burke (1969) argues that “You can’t possibly make a statement without its failing into some sort of pattern…Given enough industry in observation…you can reduce any expression to some underlying expression (p.65). In Burke’s (1969) view, the handling of information is never purely objective. The rhetorical artifacts found in the articles may seem innocuous at first look; however, through framing analysis, students can challenge the objectivity presumed by these news outlets and question the ethical implications of their writing practices as they frame information to highlight a particular argumentative stance.
In-Class Activities and Assignments
One classroom strategy that can be used to consider ethical implications of framing is to identify these instances through a comparative analysis of different written pieces addressing the complaint. To do this, students review various news articles on New York Times vs. OpenAI and compare the framed information against the complaint itself. Students look at the case statements that are included or otherwise left out of the reporting. Students also take the time to discuss why certain statements have been left out or included in the rhetorical frame of the argument, whether to support or challenge New York Times’ claims. Identifying how powerful these framing practices are to an argument centers the topic of ethical information handling in a hands-on analysis of rhetorical work done by various authors discussing the same information.
During comparative analysis activities, students consider questions like:
By responding to these questions, students challenge the concept of rhetorical framing that allows certain pieces of information to craft an argument, while excluding other, possibly essential information. This analysis also helps students understand the power of ethically handling information in writing practices. When important pieces of information are included or removed from an informational news piece, the question of ethical responsibility takes hold. Students can then challenge the effects of those ethical quandaries in the same way they are asked to challenge the ethics of mishandling information through their own AI generated products.
Figure 1. In-Class Activity: Analyzing New York Times vs. OpenAI Court Document
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Overview This activity extends the conversation of analyzing technical documentation. You will work in groups to identify five key points in the complaint that NPR has left out in their article, "'The New York Times' takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT's future could be on the line." Review the New York Times complaint against Microsoft as a legal document below. https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf Read the "Nature of the Action" of the case (1-9). Review the NPR article we reviewed in class, "'The New York Times' takes OpenAI to court. ChatGPT's future could be on the line." We will come together after the group activity to discuss essential points of the complaint that work to provide key context to the claims that the New York Times makes. |
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Requirements Work with your group to identify five statements from the document that would be ethical considerations of the case if not omitted from the NPR article. Each group member will submit his or her response listing five statements from the complaint that could be considered essential technical information necessary to understand the case's context. Each member will write his or her group number and copy + paste the corresponding statements to the textbox below. Each statement must be numbered 1-5. |
After my class has compared article information through ethical concepts of framing, students then move onto the actual civil complaint and analyze what new information comes up from the Times’ actual statements that we did not see in any of the news articles that we compared as shown in Figure 1. Students identify when certain pieces of important information are taken out and included to frame an argument. This activity lets students grapple with the different considerations of ethical writing practices. In our class, students not only get to understand a legal issue dealing with ethical policies of compromising information, but they also get hands-on experience in identifying ethical compromises of framing through the manufactured lens of information.
Throughout these demonstrated lessons, students were challenged to critically envision informative discussions outside of the context of perceived objectivity in written composition practices. Because my students had a practical context by which to understand the statements put forth in the New York Times’ claims, they were able to step into the scenarios of the case implications more concretely. Connecting the sentiments of the New York Times with student considerations of ethics, allowed for an intimate rhetorical experience with the filings’ details. However, by analyzing various “frames” of context, students were able to grasp the rhetorical weight of framing and its ethical boundaries in the analysis and generation of information to understand the value of ethical communication practices.
As rhetorical spaces of discourse evolve with technological advancement, students must be challenged with the different ways that information is spread and reformatted while they consider the ethical implications of those actions. According to Dush (2015), “The materials and associations that come with writing rarely lead to questions or critical frameworks appropriately networked and commodified digitally” (p. 181). Decades ago, ethical writing practices took shape in a different way than they do now, and composition instructors must prepare their students to challenge the shifting tides of ethics in their composition practices.
The unique opportunity that New York Times vs. OpenAI provided for addressing deep rhetorical considerations of framing gave students an understanding of how to make ethical decisions in their writing practices. In using case studies to center composition pedagogy, Kumar and Rafaei (2017) note that “A well-crafted problem…takes the focus off the instructor in the classroom and empowers students in the learning process who use course concepts to solve problems presented to them. [This learning] motivates students to learn collaboratively… and…encourages both cognitive development and critical thinking” (p.1). Taking students outside of those classroom-based perspectives showed them how ethics as rhetoric has implications both in the policies and practices of written composition. In this way, students can articulate the concepts that have social consequences as both artificial and human entities engage in practices that resemble their own.
Burke, K. (1969). A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press.
Chetwynd, E. (2024). Ethical use of artificial intelligence for scientific writing: current trends. Journal of Human Lactation 2024, 40(2) 211-215
Dush, L. (2015). When writing becomes content. College Composition and Communication, 67(2), 173-196. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24633854
Henning, T. (2011). Ethics as a form of critical and rhetorical inquiry in the writing classroom. The English Journal, 100(6), 34-40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23047878
Friend, C. (1994). Ethics in the writing classroom: A nondistributive approach. College English, 56(5), 548-567. http://www.jstor.org/stable/378606
Google AI (2018). AI principles: our approach to building beneficial AI. Google, https://ai.google/static/documents/EN_US-AI-Principles.pdf
IBM, Corp. (2022). Everyday ethics for artificial intelligence. IBM, https://www.ibm.com/watson/assets/duo/pdf/everydayethics.pdf
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Pratt, M.L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession. Modern Languages Association. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25595469
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The New York Times Company vs. Microsoft Corporation, OpenAI, OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI GP, LLC, OpenAI, LLC, OpenAI, OPCO, LL, OpenAI, Global LLC, OAI Corporation, LLC, and OpenAI Holdings, LLC, 1:23-cv-11195, 1-69 (2023). https://nytco-assets.nytimes.com/2023/12/NYT_Complaint_Dec2023.pdf
van Slyck, P. (1997). Repositioning ourselves in the contact zone. College English, 59(2), 149-170. https://doi.org/10.2307/378546