We are a “trispective generation”. We live in a present that moves like a superhighway. At the same time, we remain conscious of a traditional past and an increasingly unpredictable future.
When we look back, academic writing was a paper-and-pen activity. Educators and students generated ideas through discussions, arguments, and debates. Critical reading shaped critical writing. Literacy itself was defined very simply as someone who could read and write.
But fast forward to the world of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI). Academic writing has entered a new phase. The foundations of reading and writing are now linked to something new, that is, creative and critical prompt formulation. And this brings an important question: who is literate in the age of Gen AI?
Is literacy still about reading and writing? Or is it about how skilfully we use digital tools to think, inquire, and create?
In higher education, Gen AI literacy has become essential. Universities that understand this are training educators, investing in AI technologies, and challenging old curricula. Many have already adopted the idea of AI-powered learning to prepare graduates for a rapidly changing job market.
The 3rd Online International Conference on AI-Assisted Academic Writing, Translation, and Literacy in Higher Education, hosted by Riphah Institute of Language and Literature at Riphah International University, Lahore, showed how global this transformation has become. Seventeen presentations from twelve countries demonstrated that AI is not a classroom gimmick or a passing trend, but a literacy ecosystem.
AI is not a classroom gimmick or a passing trend, but a literacy ecosystem.
Prof. Anis Ahmad, Vice Chancellor of Riphah International University and chair of the conference, acknowledged AI’s inevitability and usefulness but stressed that it must never replace human originality, creativity, or intellectual growth. He warned that unreflective dependence on GenAI, especially among younger generations, risks weakening social connections and academic integrity. His call was clear that academics and universities must establish their own principles of authorship, accountability, and responsible AI use to ensure research and writing remain authentically human rather than artificially constructed.
From Seoul to Parlakhemundi, from Edinburgh to Malta, educators are asking the same question: how prepared are we to live with AI?
Presenters from India reported that AI-augmented pedagogy led to remarkable improvements in student writing. Prompt-based feedback cycles helped learners see their own thought patterns. AI became a scaffold rather than a replacement, while allowing teachers to focus on higher-order skills like argument, logic, and structure.
Others shared how the technology reduced grading time for mechanical errors, freeing instructors to engage with students’ ideas instead of their typos. A study from Universiti Teknologi Malaysia showed that secondary students used AI for pre-writing, drafting, and post-writing support, not merely as a shortcut but as an intellectual mirror that revealed weaknesses in their reasoning.
The lesson was not that AI creates better writers automatically, but that better writing emerges when AI is harnessed within thoughtful human instruction.
That insight is important for Pakistan, because our instinctive response to educational disruption is often defensive. We invent moral anxieties in the hope that prohibition will preserve discipline. Students from affluent backgrounds will continue to use AI privately, quietly, and advantageously, while students from public universities and underfunded institutions will be punished for not knowing how to think through machines. In the name of integrity, we will generate inequality.
One of the keynote speakers, Dr Xiuli (Tina) Chen, demonstrated uneven and unregulated AI use across universities and proposed a Library-Orchestrated AI Capability framework to standardise ethical and verifiable practices.
The conference also reminded us that AI literacy is not singular. It is plural. As Dr Muhammad Aslam argued, the modern university is not a factory that produces standardised graduates. It is a cultural space populated by academic tribes with their own disciplinary norms. Engineers do not write like linguists. Business graduates do not reason like pharmacists. A one-size-fits-all approach to AI literacy will inevitably fail because it flattens intellectual diversity in the name of convenience.
Medical educators in Lahore studying the rise of AI-assisted healthcare communication were not asking the same questions as literature professors in Belfast who used AI to generate creative translations of medieval texts. The Moroccan researchers exploring how generative AI affects the formation of research questions were concerned with depth, context, and multidimensionality. Their analysis revealed something profound: human-generated research questions tend to be complex and layered, while AI-generated ones are clean, concise, and efficient but rarely explore deeper social or epistemic tensions.
For a multilingual country like Pakistan, AI also opens opportunities that are not merely technological but sociolinguistic. Text-to-video AI, already used in some higher-education contexts, allows instructors to design linguistically responsive lessons that support students who navigate Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi, and English simultaneously. Instead of relegating these students to the margins because their first language is not the language of instruction, universities can use multimodal content to democratize access. In a society that often mistakes silence for incompetence, AI can amplify the voices of those excluded by language barriers.
Education survives through adaptation. To meet the challenges of this new era, our universities must train faculty in AI literacies, not merely police students. They must integrate AI literacy into undergraduate curricula, not postpone it to postgraduate levels. They must insist on disclosure, not penalise exploration. They must protect human agency, not outsource it to algorithms. And above all, they must understand that literacy is no longer the act of producing text; it is the ability to think critically through human and machine collaboration.
If Pakistan is serious about its educational future, it must move beyond slogans and prohibitions. AI will not write our students’ destinies. But it will expose the intellectual poverty of institutions that refuse to teach them how to think.
The first author is a Professor of English at Riphah International University, Lahore. He is a lead guest editor at Emerald and Springer publishing.
The second author is an Assistant Professor of English at Govt. Graduate College for Women, Samanabad, Lahore