Rachel Morgan | University of Louisville

[The image above is generated by Microsoft Bing Image Creator with the following prompt: “Generate an image that symbolizes the integration of artificial intelligence in a writing classroom. Emphasize the collaborative and creative aspects of AI-assisted writing without including any human figures. Consider incorporating elements that convey the synergy between traditional writing tools and futuristic AI technology.”]

Introduction: AI, Writing, and Worrying

ENGL 303: Scientific and Technical Writing at the University of Louisville (UofL) has typically focused on teaching students the genre of science and tech writing with practical real-world writing applications. When I was assigned to teach this composition course, I thought, What would make it interesting? What would make it relevant? I worried students might be bored by the idea of scientific and technical writing, particularly because the majority of students in my class took the course to fulfill graduation requirements. I wanted to make sure that students were able to see how they might use the skills we teach in scientific and technical writing even after the class was over. 

Then I thought, Why not theme the class around AI?

It’s not a surprise that our field is talking about AI, particularly with the development of chatbots and Language Learning Models (LLMs) capable of reproducing writing and language. The rumbling concerns surrounding AI use–particularly connected to ChatGPT–were loud and near immediate as writing instructors worried over students plagiarizing with AI. Earlier this year, many schools placed bans on AI like ChatGPT for concerns over cheating, but many districts are already pulling back on these bans to use ChatGPT as a tool in the classroom and beyond. The reactions to AI and writing are complicated and unwieldy, but that doesn’t change the fact that AI is here to stay. 

As more people talk about AI and its uses and misuses, it becomes clear that students are interested in AI. They want to learn how to use it, and as an instructor of writing, I want to learn how to teach it. So, ENGL 303: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Writing was born. 

And while ENGL 303 is an upper-level writing course at UofL, the theme on AI and Writing can–and should–be used in first-year composition (FYC) as well. Building AI into FYC and other composition courses asks instructors and students to engage with AI in productive and engaging ways within the classroom to develop important skills like the development of critical literacy, multimodal writing, and more. 

Course Description and Assignments

Writing the course description for ENGL 303 with AI in mind was difficult. I needed to think about what students would need to know about AI and how to work with different AI software while also making a logical connection to how it is applicable to scientific and technical writing. One obvious tension that students found believable and interesting was the anxiety of how writers may or may not be replaced by AI. This idea became one of the central concerns of ENGL 303, detailed in the course description below. 

Like other iterations of ENGL 303 at UofL, which typically focus on recognizing and responding to writing in different rhetorical situations in scientific and technical discourse communities, the AI and Writing theme allowed students to explore the relationship of AI within those discourse communities. Studying professional fields as discourse communities positioned students to consider their future careers and the implications of AI within these industries. 

ENGL 303: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Writing
Unit	Goals	Major Project
Unit 1: AI and Tech Writing	Establishing tech writing as a field of study; researching AI use within different professional fields	Field Report on AI Use
Unit 2: Ethics, Privacy, and Misuse of AI	Investigating ethical and privacy concerns of AI use; analyzing AI-generated content	Rhetorical Analysis of AI-generated Content
Unit 3: Field Use of AI and Proposal Writing	Engaging with persuasive writing as genre; writing creatively to engage research and propose fabricated AI applications	Proposal
Unit 4: Writing and Visualizing with AI	Utilizing AI software via multimodal writing strategies; creating visuals and written work with AI software	Infographic/Visual and Final Reflection

Overall, the course theme asked students to consider how AI is currently being used within different professional fields, generate awareness of the ethical and privacy concerns of AI use, including how it might be misused, and consider the future of AI within professional fields. As writers, students in this course were able to engage with AI and learn how AI works, why it is being used, and how it can facilitate writing. 

Student Response

At the beginning of the semester, I was concerned that students would find the class trite. I worried that students were overloaded and tired of their professors talking about AI. I thought they knew everything about ChatGPT and would be bored by me stumbling through trying to learn how to talk about AI and teach it in the classroom. 

I was wrong. 

Students in my class were immediately interested in the topic. They all started their field reports excitedly, engaged by the idea that they were able to choose a professional field they were interested in and learn how it was using AI (most students selected the field they were majoring in or currently studying). 

As we moved into the second unit, we studied the ethics behind AI use. One low-stakes class activity that we completed asked students to collect examples of AI-generated content and bring them to class. I encouraged students to select any text on any topic that had been generated by an AI, purposefully broader than professional or technical writing, because I wanted the activity to focus on the analysis of the products so that we could discuss the issues and stakes surrounding content created by an AI. 

Students found and submitted YouTube videos that were deepfakes of U.S. presidents, paintings sold at auction generated by Google artificial intelligence, the Reddit thread r/midjourney, and more. While other students brought examples they collected from the internet, some generated their own content, asking AI software like ChatGPT to write something for the assignment. One student prompted ChatGPT, “Write a poem in the style of Dr. Seuss about what would happen if the government of the United States sent its military to fight civilians.” 

The discussion in response to this artifact was as interesting as you might imagine. We stared at each other with wide eyes about the pro-gun narrative, blatantly obvious through the awkward rhyming, as one student read it aloud for the rest of the class. As we practiced analyzing this, students wanted to talk about how and why ChatGPT responded in this way. One student pointed out that ChatGPT inverted the prompt it had been given—instead of giving us a poem about the military going to fight civilians, ChatGPT responded with a politically-right leaning argument for why civilians need guns. The inversion of the prompt could have happened because the prompt wasn’t specific enough, which we also discussed, so this conversation turned out to be a great discussion about AI bias and how we respond to AI-generated content. 

The projects throughout Unit 3 were even more creative and interesting. Students wrote their proposals to a variety of audiences, like the CEO of Walgreens and Pfizer to implement AI into pharmacies, the U.S. National Parks Service to engage AI into research on biodiversity, local hospitals to use AI to intervene with the wellbeing of patients in rural areas of Kentucky, and more. The proposals allowed students to practice persuasive writing in a technical writing class by focusing on the proposal genre, which gave them a lot of freedom in determining what they wanted to write about and why they wanted to write about it. 

Students in my class were engaged, excited, and very creative when tasked with thinking and writing about AI. They were interested in learning how to use AI softwares to generate both text and images, and they were even more engaged in analyzing these texts. What was the exigence of their existence? What were they created to do? Who was the audience? What happened to the user or consumer of these texts, and did they believe them or not? Students were endlessly fascinated by the agency of the AI and how it works and creates something on its own, with so little human input. It made us wonder, as a class, how could we take AI software and use it as writers? What do we need to know as readers when we see AI-generated content?

Pedagogical Tips to Incorporate ChatGPT into the Classroom

There was a section of the third major assignment sheet for the Proposal that suggested students use some sort of AI software to help them write their proposal. When I reviewed this part of the assignment sheet in class, I was met with a lot of wide eyes, confused expressions, and silent questions. I waited for someone to ask a question about it. No one did. 

Despite the fact that students had been so excited and engaged with AI all semester, they were nervous about using it to actually help them with an assignment that was going to be submitted for class. I wondered if this was because students—even the students in my class that had much more academic exposure to AI—were still concerned about plagiarism and cheating allegations in connection to AI. 

I reminded my students that we were writing with AI on purpose. Using ChatGPT and other AI software during classroom activities is one thing, but actively asking them to write with it is another. Demystifying ChatGPT and introducing it as a tool that can help writers write allows students to engage with it and takes away the fear that they may be cheating or plagiarizing, especially when they learn how to use it correctly. This is just one reason that it is important to prepare students with plenty of opportunities to use it in class so they will know how it can help them write and what it can offer them as a writer. 

Here are some ideas on how to include ChatGPT in a writing classroom that have worked in ENGL 303:

1. Show students what ChatGPT is. 

A lot of students have heard about ChatGPT. When I polled students at the beginning of the semester, almost all of them had used it before or were actively using it to help them write. But, still, some students may not know what ChatGPT was designed to do or how it works. 

To show my students what ChatGPT was, I pulled it up on the projector for them to look at. I typed in a prompt and asked it a question, and we all watched as it magically spit out paragraphs of text in response. I explained what it could do, and more importantly, what it struggled to do. ChatGPT often produces “word salad,” phrases that are typically “meaningless” and sometimes “incoherent.” ChatGPT also struggles with accuracy in writing and will sometimes make up fake details or information to support what it has said, which are called “hallucinations.” Most importantly, ChatGPT reproduces societal bias and stereotypes, which is often harmful for people from marginalized groups.

2. Assign a low-stakes, in class and collaborative activity where students use ChatGPT to do something.

Sometimes the easiest way to get students adjusted to a new tool is through a low stakes activity in groups. At the beginning of the unit after introducing the assignment sheet, I grouped students up and instructed them to ask ChatGPT “what is a proposal?” and then compare those results to the directions on the assignment sheet and the information from their textbooks. The results were very different, and students were able to discuss what these differences were and why ChatGPT generated these answers. 

3. Encourage experimentation with ChatGPT. 

One way to encourage students to use ChatGPT in the writing process is to give them time to experiment with it to get relevant content. To use ChatGPT effectively, students had to practice using specific language grounded in examples to get usable responses. This became obvious in one activity where students asked ChatGPT to revise the same writing prompt multiple times by adding more information and then condensing in multiple rounds of revision. As students compared different versions of ChatGPT’s responses, they noticed how much experimentation and time it took to get relevant material from the AI. 

4. Create assignments that encourage fabrication or creative influence.

Using ChatGPT for assignments in a way that could be seen as lower stakes is often useful for getting students used to the idea of writing with it. For example, in the Proposal assignment, students used ChatGPT to help them fabricate the creative details of their project, like their proposed AI application’s name, company names, audiences, details for their AI application, and more. These creative uses have very few “real” consequences, which can help them figure out the limitations of ChatGPT and how they need to ask specific questions to get the information they want. 

5. Ask students to reflect on how they use ChatGPT to help them write. 

An important part of writing with ChatGPT is reflecting on their use of it. Asking students to indicate or think about what parts of their writing ChatGPT did and what they had to add, edit, or revise encouraged students to think critically about the boundaries of AI and human writing. How can an AI like ChatGPT replicate human writing, and where does it fail?

6. Always offer students an out. 

While many students are excited at the prospect of using AI in their writing, some aren’t, and that’s also okay. There are many concerns to be had about data and privacy in connection to AI use and the ethical considerations regarding its corpus. Offering opportunities to use AI in the classroom is great, but offering an alternative option may serve some students best. Using AI for writing should not be a requirement for assignments–not yet at least. 

Looking Forward (to FYC?)

Many writing programs in higher education are developing policies to address the use of AI and how it is connected to writing, including the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, the Writing Institute at the University of Pittsburgh, and UofL’s Composition Program. Scholars and educators in the field are talking about how AI will affect and change writing and the teaching of writing. Composition Studies has an entire issue of the journal dedicated to writing and AI and other published pieces where scholars discuss many topics on AI, including AI framed as another literacy “crisis,” what LLMs mean for writing process, and the pedagogical dangers of AI detectors. 

Students in my class have spent a lot of time working with ChatGPT and other AI applications, including AI image generators, to develop and enhance their skills. If anything, teaching ENGL 303 with this theme taught me that students are interested in AI and capable of learning how to use it expertly. Their use of it has also taught me how to better use and understand AI and writing as well. 

And while ENGL 303 is an upper-level composition course, I think these same ideas can be used for first-year composition (FYC) as well. FYC might even be particularly well suited to utilizing AI in the classroom, especially in connection to issues like the development of critical literacy, multimodal writing, audience awareness, and more. An FYC course themed around the use of AI, similar to this section of ENGL 303, would be especially useful for FYC students who are entering writing spaces at a time when there is so much discourse–both troubling and exciting–about the use of AI and best teaching practices for it.

Works Cited

“AI and the Teaching of Writing.” University of Pittsburgh, 13 November 2023, http://www.writinginstitute.pitt.edu/teaching/ai-and-teaching-writing.

Cascone, Sarah. “Google’s ‘Inceptionism’ Art Sells Big at San Francisco Auction.” Artnet, 2 March 2016, news.artnet.com/market/google-inceptionism-art-sells-big-439352.

“Fake Obama created using AI video tool.” YouTube, uploaded by BBC News, 19 July 2017, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmUC4m6w1wo.

Hubbard, Jacob. “The Pedagogical Dangers of AI Detectors for the Teaching of Writing.” Composition Studies Online, 30 June 2023, compstudiesjournal.com/2023/06/30/the-pedagogical-dangers-of-ai-detectors-for-the-teaching-of-writing/.

“Is ChatGPT biased?” OpenAI, help.openai.com/en/articles/8313359-is-chatgpt-biased. Accessed 6 Dec. 2023. 

Johnson, Arianna. “ChatGPT In Schools: Here’s Where It’s Banned—And How It Could Potentially Help Students.” Forbes, 18 January 2023, http://www.forbes.com/sites/

ariannajohnson/2023/01/18/chatgpt-in-schools-heres-where-its-banned-and-how-it-could-potentially-help-students/?sh=458f640f6e2c

Johnson, Gavin P. “Don’t Act Like You Forgot: Approaching Another Literacy “Crisis” by (Re)Considering What We Know about Teaching Writing with and through Technologies.” Composition Studies, vol. 51, no. 3, Spring 2023, compositionstudiesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/johnson.pdf.

O’Brien, Matt. “Chatbots sometimes make things up. Is AI’s hallucination problem fixable?” AP News, 1 August 2023, apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-hallucination-chatbots-

chatgpt-falsehoods-ac4672c5b06e6f91050aa46ee731bcf4.

“Policy on Artificial Intelligence and Student Writing.” University of Louisville, October 2023, louisville.edu/english/composition/handbook.html/#appendix-j.

r/midjourney. Reddit, 2023, http://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/. 

Singer, Natasha. “Despite Cheating Fears, Schools Repeal ChatGPT Bans.” The New York Times, 24 August 2023, http://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/business/schools-chatgpt-chatbot-bans.html.

“Teaching Writing with Chatbots.” Sweetland Center for Writing, Summer 2023, lsa.umich.edu/sweetland/instructors/guides-to-teaching-writing/teaching-writing-with-chatbots.html.

Vee, Annette. “Large Language Models Write Answers.” Composition Studies, vol. 51, no. 3, Spring 2023, compositionstudiesjournal.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/vee.pdf.

“word salad, n.”. Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, September 2023, <https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/5422697995&gt;