Summary:

This assignment constitutes the first of eight creative challenges that undergraduate students complete for Writing with Artificial Intelligence, an undergraduate writing course. Inspired by a writing assignment created by Professor Whitney Gregg-Harrison at the University of Rochester, this assignment asks students to reflect on the benefits they gain by writing independently as opposed to engaging in “hybrid writing” — i.e., writing performed by humans in collaboration with generative AI tools, such as Chat GPT or Claude.

Writing Prompt – What is the Value of Writing Without AI?

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) tools can now write as well as most undergraduate students. Soon, generative artificial intelligence systems will be able to write as well as Ph.Ds. In his article “Situational-Awareness.AI” Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher at OpenAI, predicts that these systems will be so smart that by 2027 they will be the work that only AI researchers and engineers are now able to do. In time these systems will be the smartest intelligence on the planet; they will achieve superintelligence.

Given the exponential development of GAI tools, given the subscription versions of these tools can now write as well as most undergraduates, do you believe writing produced solely by humans is still necessary — particularly throughout schooling? What are the benefits for students to learn how to write and to be required to tackle tough writing challenges? What do we lose if we let large language models (LLMs) do all of our writing for us? What’s special about human writing?  What do we gain by the act of writing? Does the act of writing help you develop your thinking, imagination, and ability to communicate. For you, is writing way of learning about topics or even a way of learning about yourself.

Requirements

1. 400 to 500 words. Provide the word count on to the top of the page
2. Use the first person
3. Do not use AI for this assignment
4. Provide an introduction to your brief essay.  It’s typical to add a thesis statement or main argument in the introduction but you may also follow an inductive structure if you prefer
5. Try to make your essay engaging through techniques like humor, vivid examples, and an entertaining writing style.
6. Use APA 7 when you quote, paraphrase, and summarize sources

Required Readings

1. Postman, N. (1998, March). Five things we need to know about technological change [Conference presentation]. Denver, CO, United States. https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/postman.pdf
2. Technoskeptical Framework – 5 Critical Questions about Technology (n.d.). Civics of Technology. https://www.civicsoftechnology.org/curriculum
3. Technoskeptical Framework Handout (n.d.). Civics of Technology. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1gCCh-BGrJQK6rtaNsCpi2BbFjmUy2JlFQBAdHIwHQKg/edit

Recommended Readings

• Why Write?
• Felt Sense
• The Secret, Hidden Writing Process: How to Tap Your Creative Potential
• Rhetoric & Apparatus Theory

Schedule

Step 1 – Review of Scholarly Conversations on Affordances and Constraints of Technology

For this reflection, you may rely somewhat on personal anecdote and self reflection. It’s fine to ground your analysis in your personal experiences as a writer. However, to add depth to your analysis and to spark your imagination, you should briefly review scholarly conversations on this topic. Did you know, for example, that Plato considered writing to be a technology, which he feared would undermine memory and knowledge by allowing people to lean on external memory aids rather than relying on their own memories and thoughts?

In a widely cited speech Neil Postman delivered in 1998, Neil Postman identified “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change“

1. All technological changes are not only changes of a particular tool, but are also metaphysical changes that alter the way we perceive and codify reality.
2. The advantages of every new technology are always outrageighed by its disadvantages, because every new technology benefits some and harms others.
3. There are always winners and losers in technological change, and the winners will try to persuade the losers that their best interests are served by the change.
4. Technological change is never a one-step affair; it starts a whole new series of other changes which could have been prevented with different choices regarding the original technology.
5. Once a technology is admitted and becomes part of a culture, it plays out its hand; it redefines what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy – and so on.

In essence, Postman argues that technologies are not neutral tools, but fundamentally reshape human perception, values, and society in significant ways that create winners and losers. He cautions against simply accepting technological changes without critically examining their broader metaphysical and social impacts.

Postman’s work still informs scholarly conversations about the constraints and affordances of technology, exploring how technological innovations shape human behavior, thought processes, and social structures. This discourse has been advanced by thinkers such as Sherry Turkle, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Henry Jenkins and Dennis Baron, who have examined the impact of digital technologies on communication, education, and cultural practices.

In the first paper by the MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI (2023), Byrd et al., 2023 express five key concerns about allowing students to write with AI:

1. Students may miss writing, reading, and thinking practice because they submit generative AI outputs as their own work or depend on generative AI summaries of texts rather than reading.
2. Students may not see writing or language study as valuable since machines can mimic these skills.
3. Students may experience an increased sense of alienation and mistrust if surveillance and detection approaches meant to ensure academic integrity are undertaken. Such approaches have been proven unreliable and biased; they can produce false positives that could lead to wrongful accusations, resulting in negative consequences for the students.
4. Students may face increased linguistic injustice because LLMs promote an uncritical normative reproduction of standardized English usage that aligns with dominant racial and economic power structures. Worldwide, LLMs may also perpetuate the dominance of English.
5. Students may have unequal access to the most elite tools since some students and institutions will be able to purchase more sophisticated versions of the technologies, which may replicate societal inequalities. The above risks could hurt marginalized groups disproportionately, limiting their ability to make autonomous choices about their expressive possibilities.

Part 2 – Collaborate

Meet in small groups to discuss these questions:

1. Why should aspiring writers ask technoskeptical questions?
2. What does society give up for the benefits of the technology?
3. Who is harmed and who benefits from the technology?
4. What does the technology need? How does AI harm the environment?
5. What are the unintended or unexpected changes caused by the technology?
6. Why is it difficult to imagine our world without the technology?

Part 3 – Deliverables & Submission Guidelines

Upload to Canvas Creative Challenge #1 in .pdf format.