By Michael Ristich
Like so many other academic departments across the country, the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Cultures (WRaC) at Michigan State University has been grappling with the applications and implications of generative AI (GenAI) in university classrooms. As a standalone writing and rhetoric department, we administer the (huge!) First-Year Writing Program, two undergraduate majors, one undergraduate minor, and well-known graduate programs. As a community, then, we’ve been engaged in increasing our collective understanding of generative AI, developing best teaching practices, and theorizing the ethics and use of GenAI both inside and outside of the classroom. So, when I was asked to teach our course called “WRA 308: Invention in Writing” through the lens of generative AI, I wanted to take seriously the questions and concerns I had been listening to for the better part of three years. In doing so, my thinking about the course design would be guided by following questions.
What does an open-minded approach to GenAI look like?
From the start, I wanted to move beyond the moralizing (“GenAI is terrible and will turn us into mindless zombies who can’t think!”), the disproportionate attention on “cheating” and plagiarism, and the “critique” of artificial intelligence. That’s not to say that these questions are unimportant. Quite the contrary: I think these questions deserve deep thought and attention, but that this can best be done by theorizing and examining the use of GenAI in the different facets of our lives.
What knowledge or experiences would the students bring to the class?
I wanted to acknowledge that my students would probably know more about GenAI than I did. I worked from an assumption that my students had already been using it, experimenting with it, and incorporating it into their daily lives. As a result, they would be bringing some important practices and knowledge to the course, which would, of course, serve as important resources for our community. This also meant admitting that I had spent most of my time reading about generative AI and toying with it as an object of academic inquiry.
What can our disciplinary knowledge offer the study of GenAI (and vice versa)?
Planning the course also meant grappling with how to take up questions about genAI from my own disciplinary stance, something which my colleagues and I had been writing about around the same time as I was preparing for the course. The course was, after all, primarily for students in our two undergraduate majors: Professional and Public Writing and Experience Architecture Programs. And I am, of course, a faculty member with research foci in rhetorical and critical theory. While I was certainly familiar with some of the emerging scholarship on GenAI and rhetoric and writing studies, much of it was–and still is–focused on assessing the moment and posing interesting questions to provoke further inquiry.
How might the history of AI deepen our understanding of GenAI today (and in the future)?
Finally, I wanted to situate tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, and Google Gemini in the long history of artificial intelligence beginning with Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. Historicizing our work and thinking would, I assumed, be useful context for our shared inquiry (and possibly temper the strong responses we’ve seen over the last few years regarding the ethics and use of GenAI).
Course Goals
These assumptions gave way to the following set of course goals, which I developed with the assistance of GenAI:
- Understand the Role of AI in Writing: Gain a comprehensive understanding of how artificial intelligence is transforming writing practices and the broader field of writing studies.
- Analyze AI Tools: Critically evaluate various AI tools and technologies used in writing, including their capabilities, limitations, and ethical implications.
- Develop AI-Enhanced Writing Skills: Learn to effectively integrate AI tools into your writing process to enhance creativity, productivity, and quality.
- Explore Ethical Considerations: Examine the ethical issues surrounding the use of AI in writing, such as authorship, bias, and the impact on the writing profession.
- Conduct Research on AI and Writing: Design and conduct research projects that investigate the intersection of AI and writing, contributing to the academic discourse in writing studies.
- Engage in Rhetorical Invention Using AI: Utilize AI tools to explore and develop new rhetorical strategies and approaches, enhancing your ability to invent and articulate persuasive and effective arguments.
- Articulate Best Practices for Workplace Writing: Reflect on the above learning goals to identify and articulate best practices for using AI in workplace writing, ensuring effective and ethical application of AI technologies.
Course Projects
These goals then led to four different projects:
The first project asked students to predict how they might respond to a set of prompts I had composed and distributed to the class. After putting those same prompts to GenAI, they compared their predictions with the GenAI products. I then asked students to use their comparison to provide some guidance to university instructors on how best to incorporate GenAI in their classrooms.
The second project asked students to examine some best practices related to prompt engineering and revise those from our disciplinary perspective. The result was a poster to display in classrooms. This allowed us to take up explicitly the relationship between rhetoric and writing studies and GenAI. The poster to the right was designed by three amazing MSU/WRaC students: East Bleu, Matthew Hernandez, and Brian Faucher. I appreciate their willingness to let me share their impressive work!
The third project was what I called a “reverse Turing-test.” Instead of asking whether or not GenAI can write like humans, we asked whether or not humans can write like GenAI. Students composed two pieces: one written by GenAI and another one where they tried their best to emulate the GenAI-produced text. We then visited Dr. Kate Fedewa O’Connor’s classroom to present our work and have students try to figure out which of the two was written by GenAI.
We concluded the course by looking back on our previous projects to “[r]eflect on the…learning goals [and projects] to identify and articulate best practices for using AI in workplace writing, ensuring effective and ethical application of AI technologies.” This meant looking ahead in their professional lives to develop a set of policies, processes, and/or procedures that might guide the use of GenAI towards ethical goals and effective work.
Looking Ahead
Although there are certainly things I will revise ahead of teaching the course again in the fall of 2025, the student feedback pointed to the viability of the course, and, I hope, the assumptions I made when planning for it. Reflecting on their final project, one student noted: “I’ve learned a great deal about the potential and challenges of integrating AI into professional environments. I developed a deeper understanding of the ethical considerations and the importance of clear guidelines to ensure responsible AI use. This experience has also highlighted the value of combining human creativity with AI’s strengths to enhance the writing process. I feel more comfortable now inventing evidence and structuring my arguments using theoretical frameworks, which will be beneficial in future projects.” Indeed, this student’s description of their experience in the course is, more or less, the same experience I had teaching the course. I couldn’t have said it better myself (even with GenAI).
Michael Ristich, Phd, teaches across WRAC’s programs. Get in touch at ristich@msu.edu