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Chapter 11 Writing and AI
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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199 Chapter 11 Writing and AI There is no hiding the fact that writing well is a complex, difficult, and time- consuming process. Peter Elbow, Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Now what? You’ve experimented with AI and used it to make your course more engaging and inclusive. You have new policies and grading rubrics, and AI feedback is helping your students learn and engage. You want to trust your students and don’t want to police cheating, but you also don’t want the temptation or inequity to be so great that you’re making the problem worse. You also recognize the need to help students do what AI can’t, but you still need them to write and think for themselves. We assign writing for multiple reasons. In some cases, we want students to learn to write, often in discipline- specific ways. Writing is a craft. Just as calculators did not eliminate the need for human math, AI will not eliminate the need to write and to write well and with ease, clarity, and voice (even if it is only for email or social media posts). Bowen_AI_int_5pgs.indd 199 Bowen_AI_int_5pgs.indd 199 16/02/24 4:27 PM 16/02/24 4:27 PM Learning with AI 200 We also assign writing as a pedagogical strategy that promotes cognitive processing and learning. We use it as a window into what and how students think. It is troubling that students are using AI for pro cessing and reflection and that AI can fake this well enough to fool human readers. Writing, however, is also a way of learning: one value of writing is being alone with your thoughts. Collaborating with others (or an AI) can improve your writing and even your thoughts, and we’ve seen (in chapter 4) that working with AI can make you more creative, but the struggle to find the right words yourself is also a way that we determine and clarify what we think. Donald Norman (1991) introduced the idea of “cognitive artifacts ” like paper, pens, compasses, maps, and computers that affect human cognitive performance by allowing us to represent or interface with information in differ ent ways. David Krakauer (2016) proposed a distinction between complementary and competitive cognitive artifacts. Arabic numerals or an abacus are complementary to human intelligence not only because they amplify our abilities; their use also increases our abilities, even when the artifact itself is no longer pre sent. GPS and your calculator are competitive cognitive artifacts; when they disappear, we are not better and are often even worse at the original task. It is hardly clear which type of cognitive artifact AI will turn out to be. These values of writing are rarely apparent to students who think that most of the writing we assign is a pointless exercise, just for school. We will need to think carefully about what sorts of writing we need to teach and why. AI can produce an analy sis of any text, but the point is (prob ably) not just the essay (unless you are off to graduate school). If you just need an email or article, AI can help, but writing your own wedding vows Bowen_AI_int_5pgs.indd 200 Bowen_AI_int_5pgs.indd 200 16/02/24 4:27 PM 16/02/24 4:27 PM [148.135.83.86] Project MUSE (2025-02-16 15:44 GMT) Writing and AI 201 might be the way you discover what love really means (What does it mean that AI is being used to write wedding vows [LaGorce, 2023]?). Our learning goals for our students will need to be clearer. In chapter 2, we learned that AI- Assisted Communication (and other forms of AI support) had the most effect on the least skilled: lots of technologies and tools (from automatic cameras and giant tennis racquets) help the novice the most. If the goal is just an organized and mistake- free essay, then AI writing could be the great equalizer: helping first- generation students compete with students who grew up with parents proofreading papers. If the process of writing itself is valuable, however, we could end up (like so many other well- intentioned collegiate practices) making things worse. To preserve the benefits of both learning to write and writing to learn, we need to rethink our assignments and be clearer and more convincing about their benefits, while preparing students for a world in which they will need to use AI...