Who – or What – is Writing Now? Exploring Upper Secondary Students' Chatbot-Mediated Writing Practices

Stine Brynildsen^*

• Østfold University College, Halden, Norway

This study explores how upper secondary students in Norway use conversational chatbots when writing essays in authentic classroom settings. Drawing on sociocultural perspectives of writing as mediated action, the research examines how chatbots function as mediational tools and how students negotiate and navigate their affordances. Video data from ten students and their two teachers were analyzed through thematic and narrative approaches, resulting in four key themes: 1) variations of integrating generated text, 2) getting chatbot feedback, 3) navigating academic integrity, and 4) outsourcing and humanizing the writing work. To visualize the complexity of these processes, the study introduces thematic timelines which map students' writing trajectories sequentially, temporally and thematically. All together findings reveal that chatbot-mediated writing is neither uniform nor routinized as students display diverse practices, from deliberate appropriation of generated content to outsourcing the writing to the generative AI tools. These practices challenge established notions of authorship, academic integrity, and writing instruction but also introduce new forms of student agency. Findings have implications for teachers, teacher educators, policymakers, educational researchers and other stakeholders invested in the emerging writing practices in the age of generative AI.