Mark Marino
University of Southern California
What if we could use AI to enhance our writing courses rather than destroy them? With a bit of creativity, we can take the threat of LLMs and put them in service of our course objectives, including critical thinking, using feedback, and even reading and research. Inspired by the Future of Writing Symposium, this workshop will offer several hands-on demonstrations of in-class activities that incorporate the use of Generative AI without giving up the goal of helping students develop productive writing processes. Activities will include: the Perfect Tutor exercise (developed by Jeremy Douglass), reading with AI, and the hallucination parade. The Perfect Tutor is an exercise where students develop system level prompts that specify the standards and style of feedback they wish from a writing tutor. This lesson teaches an understanding of rubrics and also the current limits of LLMs in providing feedback. In reading with AI, students use various LLMs to assist in close readings of new genres, using the LLMs to help them identify conventions, such as prose styles, citation frequency, and even structures. The last exercise involves two linked creative writing exercises whereby students vary a base text by iterating it through various transformations and hallucinations. Hallucinations here does not refer to LLMs making up false information but instead harnessing the potential of the LLM to help take a text in wild new directions not to substitute for creativity but to expand it. All of these workshops will be framed within the context of their learning outcomes for Advanced Writing students and will also be framed by critical reflection on the hazards of using these systems.
