Sean Cho Ayres

I am a poet, AI ethics researcher, and educator currently serving as an Assistant Professor in the English Department – AI Writing at Kennesaw State University (Fall 2025).

I completed my PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Cincinnati (2025), where I worked at the Digital Scholarship Center, served on the editorial teams of The Cincinnati Review and Acre Books, and studied ethical AI through digital humanities methodologies. I am also a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine (2021).

My research investigates how large language models reshape our cultural, aesthetic, and ethical understandings of creativity and labor. I approach AI not as a neutral technical innovation but as a deeply human system—structured by data annotation, editorial choices, historical archives, social biases, and the lived experiences embedded in language long before it becomes “training data.” This perspective foregrounds the human stories and labor conditions behind AI, asking what creative writing becomes when we understand these systems as collective cultural artifacts rather than autonomous machines.

Rather than focusing on what AI can produce, my work examines what AI reveals: the value of human creativity, the politics of language, and the futures of authorship, originality, and care. I study how writers interact with machine-generated text and how these interactions expose the hidden infrastructures—economic, emotional, and computational—that shape contemporary creative practice.

As a poet, my writing has appeared in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, and Pleiades, among others. My chapbook “American” Home (Autumn House Press, 2021) won the Autumn House Press Chapbook Contest and was featured on The Slowdown hosted by Ada Limón and The Chapbook podcast by Bull City Press.

In my teaching, I bring critical AI studies into conversation with creative writing, helping students understand how technologies structure language, attention, and expression. At Kennesaw State, I will teach graduate seminars examining AI through a humanistic and ethical lens, alongside workshops that encourage students to explore writing as a method of inquiry and community-making in an AI-saturated world.

I currently serve as Editor in Chief of The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought and Poetry Editor at Overhead Lit. My editorial practice views literary work as both a public conversation and a cultural record, attentive to how technological and economic conditions influence the ways writers craft meaning.

Across my scholarship, poetry, and public-facing essays, I aim to develop approaches that treat AI as a human story—one shaped by labor, culture, and care—and to advocate for creative practices that foreground transparency, ethics, and the lived experiences behind our technologies.