As higher education continues to navigate attacks from the Trump administration, it is also negotiating the increased use of AI in theclassroom by teachers and students. On this special episode, we invite our USC Writing Program colleague Dan Dissinger, host of the Writing Remix podcast, to unpack the effects that AI and LLMs have on humanities classrooms, the risks of an exponential increase in reliance on AI by students, why students are using AI, and how teachers are being impacted. They also comment on the USC administration’s decision to give ChatGPT Edu to all students and faculty.

Something that Ryan & Daniel present is a pedagogy of slowing down as an act of resistance. This approach includes reducing workloads, designing reflective assignments, and leaning heavily into process- instead of product-oriented writing to open students’ eyes to coercive branding and monetization in their lives. They call on intellects like Michel Foucault, Byung-Chul Han, Guy Debord, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Jean Baudrillard to deepen their conversation.

This episode was originally recorded and released for the 2025 Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival: “Untethering Surveillance Power Dynamics, Emerging Technologies, Social Control.”