Drafting defensively, documenting authorship: An analysis of Draftback and Grammarly Authorship

Abstract

In this piece, we offer critical interface analyses of two process surveillance interfaces, a term we use to describe personal writing tools that track students’ writing process via edits, revisions, and inserted text. Specifically, we examine: Draftback, a Google extension that predates ChatGPT-3, and Grammarly Authorship, a new beta feature for Grammarly users. Situated in scholarly conversations in digital cultural rhetorics, writing studies, surveillance studies, and user experience design, we analyze how these process surveillance interfaces reinscribe normative values for writing as product (rather than process) and facilitate feelings of suspicion, anxiety, and defensiveness for users. This analysis has implications both for instructors seeking to teach with tools like Draftback and Authorship to verify “responsible” GenAI use and instructors seeking to implement punitive anti-AI policies. Though Draftback and Grammarly Authorship are different kinds of process surveillance interfaces, they pose similar threats to writing process instruction when used for academic integrity purposes by either students or instructors. Namely, we find three issues associated with three process surveillance interfaces; namely, these tools promote 1) product over process; 2) normative constructions of embodiment and time; and 3) adversarial student-instructor dynamics.