The goal of this campaign was to, as you said, “push my argument off the page and into action,” by moving from a not so pretty to look at, dense, academic essay, to visually pleasing posters and pamphlets. My core argument is that using AI detectors is a literal coin flip that unfairly forces students to gamble their career on a stupid algorithm. The “Your Career is Not a Coin Flip” poster specifically targets the students to spark an immediate sense of urgency regarding the safety of their own careers. I’m going to be honest, this was way overkill and it’s really not that serious but I did it so that it would stand out more. The “If the Geniuses Failed” poster changes the target to educators and instructors, challenging the logic of guessing with student lives when the tech’s own creators couldn’t make it work. Next, the pamphlet acts as a tactical guide for students who have already been flagged and need help with defense. I would put the posters in high traffic campus hallways and faculty offices. On the other hand, I would distribute the pamphlets in student centers and labs.

I used Pathos in the student directed poster by using the visual of a coin to emphasize the randomness and fear of losing an 800 year old right to fairness. I used Logos in the educator directed poster by highlighting the cold, hard fact that OpenAI shut down their classifier on July 20, 2023, due to a “low rate of accuracy.” The digital aesthetic across all of my pieces is a deliberate visual appeal meant to symbolize the broken and unreliable nature of the detectors. I chose the  contrast color palette of deep blue, black, and “system error” red to get attention to people passing by. I also used the stop hand icon as a symbol to drop any previous assumptions about AI detection. In the pamphlet, I included “audience-appropriate evidence” by citing the documented bias against non-native English writers to add social justice layer to my argument. The phrase “pattern-matchers, not truth-finders” was repeated to strip away the “credibility” of the tools instructors are currently using.

Visual rhetoric is a far more effective medium for this specific argument because most people will never read a 5-page research paper, but they will look at a coin flip poster for 10 seconds. The transition from the written argument was achieved by identifying my best points (like the OpenAI failure) and turning them into punchy, high-impact headlines. While the academic paper was turned towards scholarly readers these re-casts are designed for a real life context where decisions happen fast. Next, I moved away from explaining the law in my bulk writing to applying it as a practical tool for students through the Human Contribution exception. My use of bold font makes sure that my call to action is the first thing you’ll see on the page.

I feel that the biggest challenge for me was condensing the complex legal part of it (the Human Contribution exception) into a simple three page pamphlet. A major reward was seeing how my technical skepticism could be translated into a visual campaign that actually feels like a “full-bodied experience” for the viewer. This project revealed that even the most broken algorithm can be successfully challenged when you take the argument off the page and put it into the hands of the people affected. The transition taught me that a professional level project isn’t just about good grammar…it’s about matching the medium to the needs and values of the audience. Overall, creating these recasts showed me that visual arguments have a global impact that traditional papers rarely achieve.