Taking a flexible approach to writers’ use of AI

As a writing center that serves many disciplines, we work with writers who are given quite a few different perspectives on the use of AI in their writing. In this week’s blog post Jameson explains some early thoughts on how we are working to stay flexible and responsive when AI…[hey, ChatGPT finish this sentence].

At the University of Louisville it is clear that generative AI is an important matter that the university needs to be prepared for. The Writing Center especially is going to have to deal with students who are trying to navigate using genAI safely. In fact, we likely engage most directly with a student’s writing process and are therefore at the frontlines of student AI use in writing. Our goal is to make the Writing Center an important part of the University’s response. This blog will detail what we are doing at The University of Louisville Writing Center in response to generative AI.

First it is important to understand the writing challenges that our center faces. We strive to help writers from any discipline and at any level of expertise. This means many different views on how AI should be used. We can’t just have one response for every student. Students are coming from everywhere on campus with papers that could be at any point in the writing process. Currently, the university is holding meetings on AI, and we have found that a number of schools and departments (the School of Medicine and the School of Engineering in particular) want their students actively experimenting with AI in all facets of their work. The challenge that they offer to us is finding ways to support their students in the ethical and productive use of these technologies.

In my experience trying to use AI to complete assignments as a graduate student in English, there is very little AI can do for me. It can’t perform a close reading or make an elaborate point to the level of detail that could be useful. And of course, I care a lot about writing and take care to have my own voice. I imagine other writing center professionals will have a similar perspective, but other disciplines have a completely different experience with writing. AI could relieve what they see as a burden. So, it is important that we recognize this side and be a writing center for all writers, not just use an English perspective on the uses of AI.

For this reason, if your university currently isn’t engaging with AI at all then I would suggest the most important thing they can do for the writing center is to advocate for clear academic policies for the different colleges, and even courses, so consultants have some rules to work off of. That will also be useful in designing training for consultants and developing a policy on AI ethics.

Without clearly outlined policies for each course, the consultants don’t exactly know what to do. They don’t want to accidentally get a student to commit some academic violation. Then the first order of business is to get the staff knowledgeable enough about AI so that we can meet the challenge of serving differing AI approaches across campus.

As part of my work at the writing center, I designed a workshop for consultants with the purpose of getting them up to date on how AI can engage in the writing process. This means educating them on the best uses of AI as well as weaknesses and potential pitfalls. It also expresses our current ethos of not pushing AI use onto any student. This workshop is just to prepare consultants to answer questions when writers bring up AI. We do not want to create conflicts with any professor’s AI policy, especially as these policies can be confusing or change quickly. With that in mind, the training also emphasizes familiarizing oneself with a professor’s policy and how to navigate when they do not have one. There are many uses of AI that do not require copying and pasting generated text. Consultants should be able to lead writers to safe and effective AI uses.

Our center has not seen very many writers who openly share that they have used AI. We expect that to change as assignments and even classes are designed around these new technologies. We also recognize the importance of keeping in touch with the experience of our consultants in the ways writers are using AI. This will allow us to update our training and internal policies on the best pedagogies. As the group that gets the closest to a student’s writing process, data from the writing center will be useful for understanding how students are actually engaging with AI based assignments. There are after session reports that will contain this information, and we will also make sure that this is a topic of discussion in our monthly mentor groups.

At the University of Louisville Writing Center, we are taking a positive approach to AI. The training is not how to detect if a student is using AI so we can call them out and lecture them. We want to be curious about how generative AI can aid in the writing process, and we want to be on the frontlines of this exploration. That means being well informed on AI technology, engaging with students’ writing processes, and supporting the university’s goals.