“Don’t assume any employer will feed you and pay you a salary just for being a human front-end typing things into ChatGPT!”
Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok are changing how writers
compose, think, and learn. In 2024, 45% of students reported using AI for a school project or assignment; by 2026, that figure had risen to 95% — near universal adoption (Kemsley, 2026). Used passively, these tools can diminish your
inner speech, your
felt sense, your personal agency, and your cognitive development as a thinker and knowledge worker (Kosmyna et al., 2025; Lee et al., 2025; Ward et al., 2024). Used critically and rhetorically, they can help you produce more authoritative, well-researched, and audience-focused work.
At the same time, critical AI literacy has become a core workplace competency. The MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI identifies AI literacy as both an academic and professional skill — one that employers increasingly expect alongside judgment and originality (MLA-CCCC, 2024). By 2025, 75% of knowledge workers reported using AI at work — a figure that nearly doubled in six months — and advanced AI users in professional writing fields reported 31% productivity gains and significantly higher incomes (Gotham Ghostwriters & Bernoff, 2025; Microsoft & LinkedIn, 2024). Both things are true, and this policy is designed to help you develop both.
Using AI in This Course
This course treats AI as a serious intellectual collaborator — a thought partner for testing arguments, a research assistant for mapping sources, a teaching assistant for understanding difficult concepts, and much more. The assignments are not just designed to accommodate AI use; they are designed to encourage it.
As a rough guide: if AI is generating more than about 30% of your submitted work, you have likely crossed from using AI as a collaborator into using it as a ghostwriter. No institution enforces a hard percentage, and neither do I — but the principle has real consequences.
Your chat logs are part of every submission. They make your process visible: I can see what you asked, what the AI produced, and what thinking you contributed. If the logs show that AI generated the substance of your work and you edited lightly, that submission will not receive credit.
AI Use Is Encouraged — With Disclosure
All major assignments in this course encourage GenAI use. Any time you use GenAI, you must submit a
Metacognitive Report alongside your work. The report requires you to document which roles AI played, link to your chat logs, and reflect critically on what you accepted, revised, or rejected — and why. Vague disclosures do not satisfy the requirement.
Metacognitive Report — Required for All AI Use
The
Metacognitive Report explains the full range of legitimate AI roles — Thought Partner, Research Assistant, Teaching Assistant, Editorial Assistant, and more — and provides the usage table format and reflection requirements for every assignment. Read it before you begin any assignment where you plan to use AI.
Academic Integrity: Hallucinations and Misrepresentation
Academic Integrity Warning
AI tools regularly fabricate sources — plausible-looking citations that do not exist. Students in a 2026 ProQuest survey reported asking AI tools to help locate credible academic references, only to have their professors identify the citations as entirely fabricated (Kemsley, 2026). You are fully responsible for verifying every source before you submit, regardless of where it came from. A confirmed fabricated citation results in an F on the assignment — no exceptions, no appeals. This applies to every assignment in this course.
The same standard applies to source misrepresentation. If your work substantially distorts what a source says — not a reasonable interpretive difference, but a wholesale misreading the source does not support — that is treated as a hallucination, not an honest error. You are responsible for every claim your submission makes about the work of others.
A Note on How I Grade
In addition to reading your work independently, I use GenAI tools to assist with feedback and grading. While I always read your work and make my own assessments, I find GenAI tools helpful in identifying citation issues, AI prose patterns, and problems students share across assignments. I have also developed analytical protocols for identifying AI markers in writing, and I maintain a library of prior student submissions for comparison. I reserve these tools for cases where I have serious concerns about a submission’s authorship. Repeated or egregious attempts to submit primarily AI-authored work as your own may result in an FF — a transcript notation for academic dishonesty.
Why This Policy Exists
Research consistently finds that students want AI as a guide or mentor — a tool that helps them think better — not a substitute for their own reasoning (Kemsley, 2026). This course is designed around that same principle. It asks you to understand how knowledge is made, contested, and validated across methodological communities, and to position yourself as a researcher within those communities. That thinking requires your own mind. Use AI as a tool that sharpens your reasoning. Don’t let it become a substitute for it.
