Marking Times: Assembling Feminist Reciprocity and Response-ability in and Against Generative AI

This paper, written by six casual academics at an Australian university, attends to the affective and embodied complexities bound to marking, evaluating, and critiquing students’ work in our current moment, a moment punctured by AI lawlessness and a time where AI elides and eludes institutional(ised) norms, rules, and regulations. We reflect on what it means to abide by flexible, emergent, institutionalised AI ‘ethics’ while also negotiating the schisms, complexities, and contradictions of our own AI ethics. We draw on auto/biographical accounts of marking, of speaking to and with the student-cyborg, and the de/cisions we make as we go. What are our response-abilities to the student-cyborg? How do we respond, or formulate an ethics of response, to, with, and against AI-essays? How can we centre feminist, reparative approaches to critique, evaluation, and response while simultaneously committing ourselves to the political project of what we might, after Sedgwick, term paranoid-marking? We follow these questions as they sit and circulate across and between our bodies, bodies that are marked as they mark.