AI Text Generators
Writing itself is a technology, and writing is also influenced by technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) text generators are one such technology, and they will continue to shape the writing processes of student and professional writers. With the Conference on College Composition and the Modern Language Association, however, we argue that “human endeavors are at the heart of a humanities education” and a Christian liberal arts education. AI text generators may threaten support for writing and language education, and they also promise pedagogical opportunity. On this page, we offer several practical ways of negotiating this writing technology.
Engaging with AI
The Association for Writing Across the Curriculum argues that “exclusively having AIs generate writing does not engage students in an essential mode of learning,” but it also asks instructors to explore how AI tools might be integrated into academic work: Are there scenarios, the group asks, “where student writing might productively be complemented, supplemented, or assisted by AI language generators? Can this happen in ways that do not preempt student learning?” Faculty can engage with AI in various ways:
- Ask students to use AI to respond to a prompt, and then ask them to analyze and/or revise what was created.
- Understand how AI text generators respond to your assignment prompts align those prompts more closely with your learning goals.
- Talk about intellectual property: ChatGPT acknowledges that they may share account holders’ personal information with third parties, including vendors and service providers.
- Talk about information literacy: AI text generators may create citations for nonexistent books and articles, and they may generate inaccurate information.
Pedagogy and Assignment Design
If the goal of an assignment is for students to develop writing skills—especially writing skills within academic disciplines—instructors should focus on these practices more than they should focus on AI-proofing their assignments. Meaningful writing assignments have these characteristics:
- They ask students to write for specific, authentic audiences. When faculty across the disciplines teach students to write like psychological researchers or nurses or philosophers, they do the important work of showing students that the informational element of writing is never the whole story, that effective writing is always contextual.
- They often ask students to employ primary research as well as secondary research, and guiding students through both processes helps ensure the originality of a final product.
- They connect to students’ current and future lives. Assignments can emphasize recent events, issues specific to the community, or class discussions.
- They teach and assess writing as a process. Review and revision are the durable, human skills of writing. Instructors should be interested not only in students’ ability to write a first draft but also their ability to respond to the writing of others and to revise their own words, as they will do throughout their professional lives.
- They value style. Certainly there is great value in readable prose, but when we teach students that writing is an ethical act—something that creates relationships with readers—we encourage them to think about the effects their words have on readers and the relationship they create with others.
Academic Integrity
AI text generators such as ChatGPT differ from other AI tools such as Grammarly or the editing functions of Microsoft Word because they produce words, so they must be treated differently in terms of academic integrity. Instructors might choose to include language on course syllabi prohibiting any and all uses of AI text generators. The Conference on College Composition Communication and the Modern Language Association task force, however, recommends an “ethic of transparency around any use of AI text that builds on our teaching about source citation.
Most AI generators produce a transcript of the interaction with the user, which can be reproduced as documentation.” As of August 2023, most major academic style guides have issued guidelines for citing content generated by AI. At Calvin, AI is now addressed in the Written Rhetoric definition of plagiarism (revisions in bold):
1) An entire essay written by someone else. This form of plagiarism includes, for example, essays purchased from web sites that specialize in academic essays, essays published on the web or in other sources, and unpublished essays written by others. It also includes replicating a response from an AI text generator without acknowledging what that generator provided.
2) The exact words of someone else without quotation marks around those words. This form of plagiarism can include copying exact wording (from books, articles, websites, AI text generators, and other source) without quotation marks even if a student provides documentation in the Works Cited section.
5) Undocumented use of information from someone else or from an AI generator. In this kind of plagiarism, a student takes information that she found in a particular source and presents it as her own knowledge or as common knowledge. A student must document information that appears in one or only a few specialized sources, is the work or idea of a particular person, or represents a controversial stance on a topic. A student need not document information that is common knowledge.
6) Undocumented use of information that someone else or an AI generator has collected. A student must document research aids such as web-based “research” services and annotated bibliographies.
AI Detection Tools
The CCCC and MLA issue this guidance: “Use caution about responses that emphasize surveillance or restrictions on the writing process that make the conditions of writing for class radically different from writing conditions students will encounter in other classes, work environments, and their personal lives.” We further recommend not using AI detection tools—or relying on them to make academic integrity allegations—for two reasons: first, privacy considerations exist around entering student work into a third-party sites without their consent. And second, these tools deliver both false positives and false negatives; they are not reliable enough to make critical judgements about academic integrity.
Sample Syllabus Statement
In the field of writing studies, a consensus is building around "an ethic of transparency around any use of AI text that builds on our teaching about source citation. For example, most AI generators produce a transcript of the interaction with the user, which can be reproduced as documentation" (CCCC/MLA). And at this moment, most major academic style guides have issued guidelines for citing content generated by AI. The sample syllabus statement below outlines how students may use AI and how they may not; it asks students to document and cite information from an AI query. The sample statement may be more or less permissive than individual faculty desire, and it is intended as a starting point.
Using AI Text Generators
You have very likely heard about artificial intelligence (AI) tools that generate writing when given a prompt. When students use AI to complete their writing assignments, they lose the opportunity to learn through the writing process, and they violate norms of academic integrity. We will have conversations about the role of AI in your academic work, weighing its benefits and limitations. In this course, you may use generative AI tools (e.g. ChatGPT) for the following activities:
- Brainstorming ideas
- Finding information
- Checking grammar and usage
- [INSERT YOUR POLICIES HERE; REVISE ABOVE AS NEEDED]
The use of generative AI tools is not permitted in this course for the following activities:
- Replacing your own voice and your own words in classroom contexts, including using the tool to compose discussion board prompts assigned to you.
- Writing a first or final draft of a writing assignment.
- Writing entire sentences, paragraphs or papers to complete class assignments.
- [INSERT YOUR POLICIES HERE; REVISE ABOVE AS NEEDED]
When you use information from an AI query, you are fully responsible for it: you must know that it does not violate intellectual property laws and that it does not contain misinformation. You must also properly document and cite any information from an AI query; your use of AI tools must be properly cited to stay within the academic integrity policy and the university definition of plagiarism. Any assignment that is found to have used generative AI tools in unauthorized ways will receive a grade of zero [INSERT YOUR GRADE PENALTY HERE].