Writing in an AI World

Last year, I developed an undergraduate course titled ‘Writing in an AI World.” Last fall, I implemented many aspects of that class into an Academic Writing course at my university. When I first envisioned this course, it focused on the nuances of Generative AI (GenAI) prompting, the role of fact-checking, and a nod to algorithmic bias. Halfway through the second time teaching it, the course (and my own feelings about AI) have significantly shifted. 

I’ll back up. I first stepped into the front of the college classroom 21 years ago. I had 2 years of high school English teaching under my belt and was ready to enlighten my students on how reading and writing were ways to figure things out. How we shared our ideas. How we created knowledge. Over the years, and through countless hours of graduate school, that excitement ebbed and flowed, some semesters waning more than I’d like to admit. 

EdTech and digital communication flourished in the 2010s, and I was so enthralled that I built my whole research persona out of it. When AI emerged as the “next best thing,” I immediately jumped into experimenting and playing with it. I left academia for a semester to work in corporate learning design and saw that sector was leaning into AI hard, so I did the same. Not everything was sped up by AI (I can write better learning outcomes far faster than ChatGPT), but so many seemingly “menial” tasks were lifted from my to-do list with this tech. 

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

Then I jumped back into the classroom. I asked my students to find a connection between AI and something they cared about (their major, a personal interest, something discussed in another class) and spend the semester researching it. At the end of the course, each student did a brief presentation on their project. And this is where I felt the shift. Every single student, except one who barely ever came to class, landed on the same conclusions: 1) AI is here to stay, and they don’t trust it; 2) Human oversight will never lose its necessity; 3) Authentic voices are powerful. 

I was blown away. At the start of the semester, I’d expected conclusions like “look at this cool new AI application we can use,” and “I know how to use AI ethically and effectively.” But the ethical conversation turned to recognizing imminent dangers (e.g., privacy concerns, copyright issues, misinformation, water and power use), and students overwhelmingly said they didn’t want to touch it. Now, I’m not naive. I have no doubt that overwhelmed students will turn to GenAI for help wrapping up a homework assignment or adding an extra age to a paper - but a bigger conversation is now taking up space in their heads. There is a voice of warning in the background. 

In the second semester of teaching this class, my focus shifted. I started off talking about writing as a means to build knowledge. Asking students how much information they remembered from a multiple-choice exam vs. a paper they wrote. I gave students an out to still experiment with GenAI, but to clue me in if and when they did. Some tried, but said it ended up making more work for them as they fixed its errors. 

We talked about voice and the room for creativity that does, in fact, exist in academic writing. We talked about how nuance naturally layers when writing about topics they genuinely care about. In short, my 25-year-old self reappeared in the classroom. My shining-eyed approach to writing reemerged after a long nap.

Writing is messy. Writing is our ideas unfolding in front of us. Writing is a way for us to make sense of the world. We can’t do that with something else putting the words down for us. No matter how good we are at prompting, asking the questions is only a fraction of the process. 

Now, I’m not ignoring that many of my students will move on into careers where AI will be utilized in some form. For that reason, I’m still going to have these conversations. In the same way we address plagiarism and citations each semester, we now need to address AI. And there will always be those who choose not to learn. Those who choose to take an easy route and rob themselves of an education. But after over twenty years of teaching, I find that those students are in the minority. Most want to learn and are excited by it. 

I will continue to teach “Writing in an AI World,” and it will continue to evolve. My shift is back to where I started, and I suppose I have GenAI to thank for that.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

I’ve spent a year rolling these ideas around in my head. Today, when I sat down to write about it, I let the words turn my ideas into knowledge. I didn’t ask ChatGPT or Claude to write it for me. I didn’t let Grammarly rephrase my sentences (me and passive voice are buds). I let myself grapple with the concerns I have for the class and draw conclusions about where I stand now. In short, I let my writing teach me something. 

If I wrote all this to build out my own conclusions, why am I sharing it? To encourage you to use writing to create knowledge. Let your mind do what it does best. The words don’t have to be pretty, but make them your own. 

And a final shameless plug: Want to make those words pretty? I’ll show you how (without GenAI) at Seaglass Academic Editing.