Whitney Gegg-Harrison
T/TH 12:30-1:45
4 credits
Why take this course?
- Whether you love or hate AI, you care about how it is affecting you as a writer, and the world in which you write
- You want to better understand large language models and their possibilities and pitfalls for writers
Key skills you’ll gain
- You’ll learn how to identify and debunk different types of hype and misinformation in media about AI
- You’ll learn from published authors and guest speakers about how AI is (or isn’t) used in their writing context (e.g. fiction, journalism, memoir, academic writing)
- You’ll learn how to compare the features of human writing with the features of AI-generated writing (and better understand why there’s so much conflict around “AI detection”!)
- You’ll practice communicating across differences: AI is an often-contentious topic, and we won’t all be coming from the same place
Full course description
What does it mean to be a writer in a world where AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude can produce text that is at least sometimes indistinguishable from text written by a human? In this course, we will explore a variety of AI tools with the goal of understanding how these tools might fit into the writing process and where the possible pitfalls lie. We’ll learn how to interpret articles about AI in the media with a critical eye and discuss what would be necessary for media to do a better job of writing about AI. But we’ll also experiment with AI tools to explore what it means to write with AI. Throughout the semester, we’ll dive deeper into what it is that we humans do when we write, from brainstorming all the way through final drafts, and we’ll probe what happens when we add AI to the mix at each of those stages in a series of reflective assignments. These will build towards a final project in which students offer a research-based proposal for a specific way in which AI could be effectively and ethically used by writers.
