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 personified chatbot interfaces shape—and often distort—the public’s understanding of what large language models actually are. I approach AI not as a neutral technical innovation but as a deeply human system: structured by data annotation, fine-tuning by human workers, and design choices that deliberately invite users to experience statistical outputs as empathetic, caring, and present. This perspective foregrounds what I call the “confessional interface”—the rhetorical packaging that transforms a predictive model into something users treat as a confidant, therapist, or friend.

Rather than focusing on what these systems can produce, my work examines what they invite users to believe they are: the widening gap between fluent output and grounded understanding, between simulated empathy and actual care. Building on the ELIZA effect, I study how conversational design enables “affective disavowal”—the stance in which users can know a bot is not human and still relate to it as if it were. In response, I propose a teachable framework for critical AI literacies that converges with critical media literacy: the ability to recognize interface persuasion, identify the incentives shaping product design, and make safer decisions about when—and whether—to treat chatbots as confidants.

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.