Rhetorica Marc Watkins Substack

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-Nov 18, 2025, 7:42 AM

Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society. Notes from a nontraditional student turned educator: culture, AI, education. Click to read Rhetorica, by Marc Watkins, a Substack ... Marcwatkins.substack.com most likely does not offer any malicious content. Marcwatkins.substack.com provides SSL-encrypted connection. Marcwatkins.substack.com most likely does not offer any adult content.

Notes from a nontraditional student turned educator: culture, AI, education. Click to read Rhetorica, by Marc Watkins, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers. Lecturer in Composition and Rhetoric and Assistant Director of Academic Innovation Marc Watkins is an educator and researcher at the University of Mississippi who specializes in the intersection of artificial intelligence and education. He directs initiatives to explore AI's impact on learning, leads faculty training on AI literacy, and advocates for a balanced approach to integrating AI in education Critical AI Literacy, AI in Education, Generative AI Beyond ChatGPT

Marc Watkins directs the AI Institute for Teachers and is an Assistant Director of Academic Innovation at the University of Mississippi, where he is a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric. He has led research initiatives, exploring generative AI’s impact on student learning, training workshops for faculty on AI literacy, and several institution-wide AI institutes. His work with generative AI in education predates ChatGPT and he advocates approaching the technology’s integration in education with curious skepticism. When training faculty in applied artificial intelligence, he believes educators should be equally supported if they choose to work with AI or include friction to curb AI’s influence on student learning. His work with training faculty in AI literacy has been profiled in The Washington Post. He regularly writes about AI and education on his Substack Rhetorica.

Marc has spoken to colleges, universities, and private organizations across the globe, including Stanford, Brigham Young University, Grammarly, The Southeastern Conference, and the Northwest Commission of Colleges & Universities. He’s also worked with K-12 schools on AI literacy efforts. His award-winning writing has been reprinted in the Pushcart Prize and appeared in over a dozen literary journals, including Boulevard, Litmag, StoryQuarterly, Third Coast, and elsewhere. As an educator, his work with Open Educational Resources was recognized by Blackboard with a 2018 Catalyst Award for Teaching and Learning. MFA Creative Writing, Texas State University-San Marcos (2010) Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society.

Assistant Director of Academic Innovation, Director of the Mississippi AI Institute, Lecturer of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Mississippi. I train faculty in AI literacy. The number of free subscribers for Rhetorica over time since it was added to the directory. Let's figure how to best integrate and implement generative AI into today's classrooms! Exploring the creative interface between human and machine in writing, the classroom, and the workplace Generative AI may be one of the most transformative technologies we’ve seen arise in our lifetime, but its integration into our lives and cultural practices has been unwelcome to many people, and for good...

The AI industry has relentlessly pushed chatbots into education by making them freely available to every student, even though they know this breaks assessment practices. Signals people use to identify meaning are breaking outside of education. AI-generated slop is present in virtually every workplace, social media feed, and increasingly in interpersonal communication. Companies have taken a powerful technology that people don’t have prior experience with and released it with the same spammy furor of a Candy Crush clone. It is no wonder we’ve seen the wholesale rejection of AI by some, while others uncritically embrace it to do increasingly human-like tasks. Perhaps most alarming is the pivot we’ve seen play out this year from companies signaling to workers that the expectation isn’t to learn how to use AI to augment human skills, shifting instead to...

Once a task or role is automated, it rarely returns. Rhetorica is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. One of the easiest entry points to start a conversation about AI is viewing one of the recent commercials or campaigns and analyzing how AI is being sold. There are many! Watching a few is enough to get a sense of how saturated the landscape has become.

It will also hopefully give rise to some thoughtful questions about what is being sold, who the audience is, and why it matters. For the second year in a row, the annual Coca-Cola holiday commercial is entirely AI-generated, but that’s just a sample of what’s out there. Systems like ChatGPT are being updated all the time. You’ll soon be able to shop via chatbot and many of the developers are rushing to implement updates that create an “intention economy” where early signals from users are mapped for an advanced AI... It’s common for a tech company to ship an update only to roll it back a few days later because it had bugs. But what happens when a bug is behavioral in a system designed to mimic human understanding and used by nearly half a billion users each week?

OpenAI’s recent update to ChatGPT caused many users to complain that the outputs to seemingly normal questions were a bit too complimentary and involved a disturbing level of flattery. What Sam Altman and users on X started to refer to as ‘glazing’ on the part of ChatGPT—a type of behavior they’ve closely tied to the concept of sycophancy— led OpenAI to rollback the... To OpenAI’s credit, they caught the issue early and acted. They’ve also attempted to be transparent about how they intend to deal with issues going forward, but this isn’t simply a challenge OpenAI has encountered and isn’t one that has a simple solution. Generative AI is deployed as a massive social experiment, much like blockchain, social media, online gambling, and any number of things that arrived with the internet age. Change arrives rapidly now that we have a computer in our pocket at all times.

I struggle to believe generative AI should be treated like a normal technology, so do the creators of tools like ChatGPT. LLMs are already capable of superhuman persuasion. The real danger isn’t one bad update—it’s the industry-wide pattern of prioritizing scale over caution. Rhetorica is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The recent AI marketing blitz is selling a future that many reject.

I collected quite a few examples in this post and left ample room for others to analyze the marketing tactics being used, including the Friend AI campaign and the backlash it caused.

Rhetorica Marc Watkins Substack

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