Writing around an AI taboo

A new collection of AI-assisted writing assignments co-edited by University Writing Program lecturer Carly Schnitzler offers teachers practical ways to incorporate AI into their classrooms while setting ground rules for its use The ascendance of large language models like ChatGPT has all but wrought a collective existential crisis among writing instructors. Due to a rise in large language model-assisted plagiarism, student essays are no longer reliable indicators of ability. How then, do writing instructors meaningfully assess their students? And with the labor of writing easily outsourced to a computer, why should students care about comma splices and semicolons? Term papers can be generated by AI, but the skills developed by the act of writing—thinking critically, conducting research, and arguing a position, to name a few—cannot. As large language models become more sophisticated and accessible, equipping students with these vital abilities will require a pedagogical revolution. This revolution has already begun; rather than banishing large language models from their classrooms, many writing instructors have invited the technology in, with an emphasis on critical engagement. Among them is Johns Hopkins University Writing Program lecturer Carly Schnitzler , who co-edited TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies , an open-access, peer-reviewed collection of generative AI-assisted writing assignments. Schnitzler describes these assignments as “[offering] up text generation technologies as objects of study in a writing and rhetoric context … to be critically integrated into the writing process instead of taking over the writing process.” The textbook is split into five sections—AI literacy, creative explorations, ethical considerations, professional writing, and rhetorical engagements—that together contain 34 undergraduate-level exercises, all of them successfully vetted in classrooms before publication. With biannual updates, the collection will keep pace with the rapid progression of text generation technologies and the teaching pedagogy that follows. “What I would encourage instructors to do when thinking about this technology is adopt a pragmatic approach, because the cat's out of the bag here.” In January, Schnitzler presented on TextGenEd at the Modern Language Association conference in Philadelphia, where she encountered a receptive […]