Dr. Gabriel Aguilar is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Writing, University of Texas at Arlington.
NOTE: This Q/A format-style post was inspired by a news release written by Cristal Gonzalez of the UT Arlington Marketing, Messaging, and Engagement team, titled Old tricks, new tech: scams in the age of AI – News Center – The University of Texas at Arlington. We encourage you to read that article in conjuction with this interview-style piece! -Dr. Peggy Semingson, CRTLE
Dr. Aguilar brings a unique perspective to the classroom—one shaped by personal experience, community engagement, and a deep commitment to preparing students for an AI-driven world. In this Q&A, he shares insights on teaching AI literacy, mentoring the next generation of technical communicators, and why transparency is our first line of defense against digital threats.
Q1: Your recent research highlights the dangers of AI scams. How has your knowledge in this area shaped your approach to teaching on this topic?
My approach to teaching about AI scams is to be transparent. I was a victim of a scam, and so were some of my close friends and family. AI scams are everywhere. Chances are if you’re reading this, a scammer has used AI to try to get something from you: your information, phone numbers, passwords, email addresses, bank account information, etc. AI scams come in all shapes and sizes but, for the most part, scammers use AI to expedite the scamming processes so that scams happen at scale. They use chatbots to automate fake postings on social media or to send mass text messages, profiling AI to screen personal information and rate the susceptibility of a potential victim, and voiceover to mimic the voices of loved ones. Research has shown that whatever data we have on the impact of AI scams is just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of AI scams go unreported because people feel ashamed. I want to change that. It’s empowering to know that there are others that fell victim to a scam. It’s even more empowering to know that together we can prevent others from harm. So, my teaching about AI is shaped by not only my experiences with AI scams but also my expertise in communication and information design. I believe that our first line of defense is each other, and the classroom is a good place to start.
Q2: You emphasize the role of technical writing in increasing AI literacy. Why is technical communication such a powerful tool in combating digital misinformation and scams?
Technical communication provides a skillset to think critically about the needs of people and how technology meets those needs. I train my students to be leaders in their workplace and community by being a resource for their peers and employers. I want my students to be the ones who catch something that feels off, whether it’s a phishing attempt that’s slipped through IT in an organization or if their grandmother receives a threatening voicemail that she must deposit Bitcoin at an ATM to retrieve her bank account information. Technical communicators help others take a breath and assess the situation.
Q3: You’ve talked about learning from your students. Can you share a time when a student insight reshaped your teaching approach?
I can’t tell you how much I learn from our students. We have really ambitious pupils at UTA, and I’ve had to learn to step back and let my students explore their interests. When I was a graduate research assistant at Penn State, I was accustomed to guiding my students through meticulous guidelines that helped them understand the importance of professional writing in whichever industry they want to join. However, now that I’m faculty, I can make my classes more complex, and I’ve found that the complexity requires less strict guidance, especially for upper-level students. For example, I had a student in my advanced technical and business writing course who had trouble with the guidelines I provided for a project. This student is an aspiring screenwriter, and, like many other creative students, he saw little overlap between screenwriting and technical writing. I tried to give strict guidelines on how to apply business writing in creative space, but it wasn’t until I asked the student to spend a class period exploring the technical processes of screenwriting that a lightbulb finally went off. He came back with a project about union guidelines, contracts, and schedule of minimums that all screenwriters need to know. The thing is—as he told me—screenwriters typically don’t learn about these technical processes until they are looking for a job, and by that time it’s sink or swim. But he got the opportunity to explore these forms of writing in a classroom environment, and his project was all the more rewarding because it was self-directed. I learned a lot from him.
Q4: You’ve developed a framework for teaching AI literacy. Could you share a bit about how this framework works in practice?
There is no one who is completely AI literate, but you can be more proficient in certain areas of AI than others. My framework of teaching AI literacy begins at the community level. There are many avenues to increasing AI literacy at the community level (I, for example, hold workshops at local libraries to help people learn about scams), but at a university, the classroom is often the most effective place. In line with other parts of my teaching philosophy, I encourage my students to discuss their own experiences with AI. You’d be surprised just how much they know, but, because there is a stigma about AI use in higher ed, many students feel ashamed that they use AI. I see a patchwork of AI literacy among my students. Some are really good at prompt engineering, others at task management or project brainstorming, and others that have yet to adopt AI into their workflow for ethical or personal reasons. Often, these AI-adverse students are really good at pointing out the inconsistencies with AI in art and media. And then there’s me, a professor who studies AI scams, with knowledge on how AI scams work. My job is to stitch together this patchwork to get students to understand that we need each other if we are to navigate the age of AI. Then, I tell my students to go share that knowledge with their communities, and the patchwork hopefully builds a robust literacy slowly but surely.
Q5: You have an “Unrestricted Use of GenAI” policy in your syllabus. What does that mean for teaching and learning in your classes?
I don’t police my student’s use of AI for a number of reasons. I teach technical writing, which is an applied field in the humanities. My courses are designed for my students to self-direct each project according to their own aspirations, interests, and career goals. I have classes where a future lawyer will work through the same assignments as a future doctor, screenwriter, or data analyst. Each student brings themself into the very architecture of my assignments, and it’s here where I think AI has a serious limitation. AI can’t think for you. You can think with AI. It can help you brainstorm or even format and create the genre for an assignment (like a memo or a grant proposal). However, because my assignments are so self-involved, my students quickly realize that an AI can’t reproduce a project that reflects human desires, wants, and needs. Students will have to work with AI to create a project that can be used in the real world where real people communicate with each other to solve real problems. I don’t care whether my students use AI or not. I care if they invest in their own success, and AI can’t produce projects that do that kind of work without serious investment from the student.
Q6: How do you mentor students who are interested in connecting technical communication with ethics or advocacy?
I mentor by having my students critically align their personal interests and experiences with research in technical communication. My approach to ethics and advocacy is to localize those terms in good faith. I had a chapter published in The Routledge Handbook of Ethics in Technical and Professional Communication, this huge book that covers dozens of ethical approaches to the field. My chapter was on Chicano ethics, and I argued that there really is no such thing as a Chicano ethics, but local Chicano communities have built their own approaches that can inform technical communication scholarship. My graduate students respond well to this approach. I have pupils from all over the world—Kenya, Nepal, Canada, US Pacific Islands, you name it—and each one sees the world differently. I’m not an expert in what ethical technical writing looks like in their local contexts, but I can help them learn to articulate the ethics that recognize in research and writing. My grad students have a good track record of publications and conference presentations, and they have built their ethical frameworks with other scholars from their homes.
Q7: In a field that changes rapidly, how do you keep your teaching and research responsive to new technologies?
There’s an easy answer to keeping curricula and research relevant in a changing technological landscape, but the answer is hard to apply. Technical communication is a field in the humanities that centers teaching and research in rhetoric. I always tell my students that while AI is seemingly all we can talk about today, there will eventually be a new technological trend. Does that mean we throw out all what we know about AI when it fades into the background? My answer is no. To be valued members of an organization or society, we must learn to recognize that technological changes occur on the shoulders of past technological moments. I’ll give an example from my article about AI scams. In that piece, I argue that AI scams didn’t occur in a vacuum. Instead, scammers used decades of knowledge to train AI on how to scam specific people. For example, multi-level marketing (MLM) scammers target Latino communities more so than others, and AI scammers use MLM data to scale the scams in ways not possible with just human scammers alone. The same is true with any other technology. In instance, my PhD advisor at Penn State wrote a book in the early 2000s called Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, a book that future-proofed working with digital technologies by requiring users to think rhetorically about computers. Even 20 years later, when computers advanced beyond what was imaginable in 2004, that book is still used to teach people to see technological changes are evolutions, not revolutions, of one another. So, to answer the questions, I teach my students to look at the technological landscape as a living text with various stakeholders that weave in and out. Their job is to always read that text rhetorically and to never be captured by the latest trend. I want our students to be the first persons people think of when a new technology blindsides academia and industry like AI did a few years ago.
Q8: What keeps you motivated and inspired in your work at UTA?
The students keep me motivated and inspired. I can’t describe the privilege it is to work with the brightest minds our state has to offer. My classes have such a breadth of interests that range from the hard sciences to the arts. I feel their passion and optimism in each one of our class discussions and in each project. I’ve quickly learned that our students are ready for any challenge. They just need the right mentor to show them how to do the work. There is no better feeling than seeing that little light bulb go off when a student takes something I said in lecture or in my feedback. I know that they’ll come back with an amazing application to the idea I helped spark.
Many thanks to Dr. Aguilar for sharing his expertise with CRTLE and UTA!
Resources:
Mentis page: Gabriel L Aguilar – Faculty Profiles – The University of Texas at Arlington
Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) Faculty Page https://cmas.uta.edu/faculty-and-staff/
Google Scholar Profile https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Xlq_V60AAAAJ&hl=en
UTA News Center Feature https://www.uta.edu/news/news-releases/2025/10/09/old-tricks-new-tech-scams-in-the-age-of-ai
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About Dr. Gabriel Aguilar: Dr. Gabriel Aguilar is an Assistant Professor of Technical and Professional Writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. He specializes in communication in the borderlands and is an expert in public health and technical communication. His upcoming book, Humanitarian Health Communication, investigates the professional communication and design thinking of humanitarians at nonprofits. He also teaches classes at the undergraduate and graduate level that prepare students for their future workplace.