This course introduces students to the essential writing and design technologies they will use in their careers. The course adopts a case-study approach. Students act as researchers on an eleven-member team funded by the university. Under the direction of Dean Stacy Adams, the university’s AI Czar, they investigate five foundational research questions:

1. What, according to Ong and Bolter, is writing? How does writing shape human thought, consciousness, creativity, and social development? 
2. What is the appropriate response for colleges and universities to the use of generative AI in writing: maintaining existing academic integrity standards, redefining them, or prohibiting AI use altogether? 
3. Does GenAI use undermine critical thinking, reduce cognitive effort, and erode students’ sense of ownership and accuracy in their writing?
4. What is the Future of Work in the Age of Superintelligence? How are AGI and ASI expected to transform white-collar work across industries—not just at the entry level, but at every stage of the career ladder?
5. How does GenAI reshape creativity, authorship, composing, learning, copyright, and work—and what do those transformations mean for human agency and higher education?

Links to Major Course Project

Click the links below to open the detailed writing prompts for the major course projects. (To ease navigation, you may find it useful to create bookmarks for these course projects in your internet browser.)

1. Presentation – Why Human Writing Matters in the Age of AI
2. White Paper – Generative AI, Ethics, and Academic Policy Recommendations
3. Autoethnographic Study — The Effects of GenAI Use on Thinking, Composing, and Ownership
4. Literature Review – What is the Future of Work in the Age of Superintelligence?
5. Final Project – Contribution to A Guide for Navigating AI Disruption

See Writing with AI – Summary of Creative Challenges for a more detailed summary of how these projects.

Scope

Regarding scope, this course will not address the environmental consequences associated with AI usage. Additionally, we do not address privacy and surveillance issues. Students will also not have time to become proficient with all of the AI systems we play around with. Rather, the goal is to introduce students to research and scholarship on AI and to support play with emerging GenAI tools in ways that are ethica.

Ideally, this puts students in an agentive position, a position to reflect critically on the constraints and affordances emerging AI tools.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, students will be able to:

1. Explain how writing technologies have historically shaped human consciousness, creativity, and social structures, and assess what is at stake as generative AI increasingly takes on writing tasks.
2. Accurately summarize, paraphrase, and quote from scholarly texts, clearly distinguishing authors’ arguments and situating them within broader debates about writing, authorship, and AI.
3. Demonstrate critical AI literacy by evaluating the accuracy, reliability, and limits of GenAI outputs, including summaries of complex scholarly arguments.
4. Understand and apply conventions of academic integrity, including APA 7 citation, annotated bibliography practices, and attribution of AI usage.
5. Augment textual research with interviews and other forms of evidence to develop richer, more nuanced perspectives.
6. Compose evidence-based arguments in genres such as white papers, presentations, and policy briefs that address audiences across academia, industry, and the public sphere.
7. Communicate persuasively through oral, written, and multimodal forms, using effective design, structure, and research support.
8. Provide and incorporate constructive peer feedback to strengthen clarity, argumentation, and ethical awareness in their work.
9. Use generative AI tools ethically and reflectively to support idea development, research, and composing processes, documenting these practices through metacognitive reports.
10. Engage in scholarly dialogue that advances collective understanding of AI’s impact on authorship, academic integrity, and the future of work.

Why Does this Course Matter?

The MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI identifies critical AI literacy as an academic and workplace literacy. The MLA encourages educators to integrate AI literacy into curricula to prevent misuse, support ethical authorship, and promote critical thinking (MLA-CCCC, 2024a; 2024b).

Over the past few years, use of GenAI has become commonplace in higher education:

• A February 2025 UK report by HEPI and Kortext found that 92% of over 1,000 full-time students surveyed used GenAI for coursework (Freeman, J., 2025.)
• The Digital Education Council’s 2024 survey of nearly 4,000 students across 16 countries found 86% using AI academically, with 72% wanting more training and 80% reporting that their universities were not meeting expectations for AI integration (Digital Education Council, 2024).

In work settings, Microsoft has found AI usage to be growing exponentially.

• Microsoft’s 2024 Work Trend Index, based on a survey of 31,000 workers across 31 countries, found that 75% of knowledge workers now use AI at work—a figure that nearly doubled in six months.
• By 2025, 78% of business leaders reported plans to add AI-specific roles, and nearly half were automating entire workflows with AI (Microsoft, 2025).
• In a 2025 McKinsey report on Superagency in the workplace, 92% of companies plan to increase AI investments over the next three years (Mayer et al., 2025).

Microsoft argues GenAI can help knowledge workers manage the chaos of today’s information flow. McKinsey also predicts AI will significantly boost productivity, adding up to $4.4 trillion to the global economy through corporate use cases. But they also warn that GenAI greatly expands what kinds of work can be automated, shifting many writing, analysis, and communication tasks from humans to machines.

That’s why The MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI identifies critical AI literacy as an academic and workplace literacy. The MLA encourages educators to integrate AI literacy into curricula to prevent misuse, support ethical authorship, and promote critical thinking (MLA-CCCC, 2024a; 2024b).

Writing itself is changing in response to these new writing tools and changes in literacy practices. For about 130,000 years, humans communicated orally. For the past 5,500 years, we have engaged in internal dialogues to compose and communicate. Now, for better or worse, we are reconfiguring our writing processes.

There is no going back to the pencil, the quill, the stone tablet, or the romanticized myth of the solitary writer in the garret.

Writing has changed, and so must we (Moxley 2025).

Use of GenAI May Undermine Human Cognition

Let’s take advantage of this moment of clarity, and forget the speculative futures. If we wake up to millions of addicted and deluded AI chatbot users, students incapable of finishing their homework without help from an app, and automation software that surveils and immiserates workers, each hurriedly installed on the top layer of our society, well, the joke will have been on all of us.

Brian Merchant

Recent research warns about the risks of over-relying on AI. Studies show that when students use AI to generate their writing, they often do less cognitive work themselves—showing weaker memory, lower engagement, and less ownership of their ideas (Kosmyna et al., 2024; Lee et al., 2025). And because thinking is often effortful and even unpleasant (David et al., 2024), it’s tempting to outsource it. But that’s exactly why it’s worth practicing.

This course takes these realities seriously. You’ll learn to write as an act of real thinking and problem-solving, while also learning how to use AI as a partner rather than a crutch. By treating writing as a rigorous, reflective practice, you’ll build the skills you need not only to succeed academically but also to thrive in a world where human and machine thinking increasingly intersect.

GenAI Will Redefine Work—And Your Role in It

A recent study analyzing 200,000 real-world Bing Copilot interactions found that GenAI is already assisting or performing tasks in writing, advising, information gathering, and teaching—especially in occupations that rely heavily on communication, knowledge work, and administrative support (Tomlinson et al., 2025). These are not blue-collar or entry-level tasks—these are central to high-skilled, college-educated professions.

To quantify this shift, Tomlinson et al. developed an “AI applicability score” combining task-level AI performance with occupational data. Their results (Table 3) show that AI is most applicable to roles in:

• Computer and Mathematical occupations (e.g., software developers, data scientists)
• Office and Administrative Support
• Business and Financial Operations
• Legal professions
• Media and Communication
• Education, Training, and Library services

These findings confirm that generative AI is not only changing how work gets done—it is reconfiguring who does the work and what competencies still matter. Writing, reasoning, and communication remain core to these professions, but they are now often mediated by AI tools.

This course gives you a chance to think critically about how your career might be affected and how to maintain agency, authority, and adaptability in the age of GenAI. You’ll develop rhetorical, analytical, and metacognitive skills to ensure you are not replaced by AI—but can work effectively with it.

AI May Diminish Human Agency

The rapid progression of generative artificial intelligence raises profound questions about the future of human agency. In 2022 Anderson and Rainie, in partnership with the Pew Research Center, surveyed 540 “technology innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers, academics and activists.” Remarkably, they found that 56% of the experts believe AI will limit human agency, expression, and creativity.

In a subsequent study, Rainie and Anderson surveyed and canvassed, in partnership with Elon University’s “Imagining the Digital Future Center,” hundreds of global technology experts to investigate their thoughts on AI and the future of humanity. One of the five major concerns expressed by these global experts was the fear that “humanity could be greatly enfeebled by AI:”

A share of these experts focused on the ways people’s uses of AI could diminish human agency and skills. Some warned it will nearly eliminate critical thinking, reading and decision-making abilities and healthy, in-person connectedness, and lead to more mental health problems. Some said they fear the impact of mass unemployment on people’s psyches and behaviors due to a loss of identity, structure and purpose. Some warned these factors combined with a deepening of inequities may prompt violence (Rainie and Anderson 2024).

Superintelligence May Threat the Future of Humanity

In 2024, Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher at OpenAI, has speculated, based on historical trends, that AI may reach GAI “superintelligence” by 2027 (see Situational Awareness). At that point Aschenbrenner predicts generative AI tools will be able to write as well as Ph.Ds in computer science — or any other topic in any language. Additionally, he argues that AI systems will no longer need humans to engage in inquiry. Rather, given their programmed thirst for knowledge, they will be solving new problems and creating new medicines, surgical procedures, and ways of knowing. They will be smarter than humans.

In April of 2025, the idea of superintelligence moved from science fiction to the daily news. As the AI Futures Project notes, superintelligent agents are already capable of strategic planning, scientific reasoning, and recursive self-improvement (Kokotajlo et al., 2025; see AI 2027). Their future? One of two extremes: salvation or extinction. In one path, these systems unlock medical cures, climate solutions, and cosmic exploration—amplifying human agency. In the other path, they render us irrelevant or worse. They don’t need to hate us to eliminate us. They simply need to pursue goals that bypass or disrupt human needs—maximizing efficiency, for example, at the cost of human agency or survival.

In a recent 60 minutes interview, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI” warns humanity that achieving “superintelligence” may potentially be dangerous to humankind.

AI Threatens The Values of Higher Education

Authorship, plagiarism, academic integrity—these social conventions uphold the author as sacrosanct, ensuring that writers are credited and rewarded for their intellectual labor. In higher education, the integrity of academic and scientific work hinges on citation, particularly the expectation that writers will acknowledge their intellectual debts. But generative AI disrupts these foundations. Its large language models are built on what many scholars consider the greatest theft of intellectual property in history—trillions of words scraped without consent from books, articles, websites, and databases. Although companies argue this constitutes “fair use,” that legal defense remains untested in court and ethically suspect. When students generate content with these tools without disclosure, they compound the problem, passing off AI-generated summaries, paraphrases, or arguments as their own. Citation ceases to be a record of inquiry and becomes a hollow gesture. In this environment, the fundamental values of higher education—authorship, integrity, and originality—aren’t merely eroding. They’re under assault.

First-Day Attendance Mandatory Assignment

Assignment Prompt

USF’s First Day Attendance Assignment requires that I call attendance during our first course meeting. Because this is an online course and we don’t meet face-to-face, I’ve set Wednesday, 8/27, at 3 p.m., as the arbitrary due date for first-day attendance. assignment. Per USF mandatory first-day policy, you need to complete the assignment below to stay registered in the course. 

Requirements

1. Read the Introduction to the Course (above)
2. Read Hsu, H. (2025, June 30). What happens after A.I. destroys college writing? The New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/the-end-of-the-english-paper
3. Read Tomlinson, K., Jaffe, S., Wang, W., Counts, S., & Suri, S. (2025). Working with AI: Measuring the occupational implications of generative AI. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07935
4. Watch The Godfather in Conversation: Why Geoffrey Hinton is worried about the future of AI
5. Write a 500 word argument and publish it at the Course Discussion. Your argument should address
   1. Address why university students should think be cognizant of the potential affordances and constraints of GenAI. This argument needs to be supported by summaries and paraphrases of the assigned readings. It should also include at least one specific quote made by Hinton in his 60 minutes interview. 
   2. Reference the readings and YouTube video by introducing them into your text and hyperlinking to those resources when referencing them. You are not expected to follow APA 7 for this assignment. Hyperlinks, though, are required.
   3. Place the word count at the top of your discussion-board post

Grading

• You will receive an A if you submit a thoughtful, 500 word argument that is responsive to the writing prompt, using Standard Written English
• You will receive a C on the assignment if your argument is under 500 words, has a number of stylistic flaws that impede clarity, and fails to address all three readings and video
• You will receive an F on the assignment if you fail to submit your post on time, if the document lacks clarity, and if it fails to respond to the assignment prompt.