Writing Responsibly: Considerations for Academic Writing in the Time of Generative AI
Dr. Laurie McNeill
Department of English Language and Literatures, University of British Columbia
Abstract: In this chapter, we will consider what it means to write with integrity in the age of generative artificial intelligence, or GAI. How do we understand these technologies, decide how and when to use them in our classes and beyond, and maintain our responsibilities – as students, professionals, community members, and consumers?
In February 2023, the Peabody School at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee sent a broadcast email to its students following a school shooting at Michigan State University. The email, though signed by several school administrators, included a note that it had been written by ChatGPT – a detail that caused a furor in the campus community, leading to two of the administrators “stepping aside” during a subsequent review (Korn 2023). Students were outraged that the school had outsourced this particular communication – a message about care and community, prompted by a tragedy — to a chatbot.
So why were people outraged? After all, the administrators seemed to do the right thing by acknowledging their use of this tool. What made authorship by ChatGPT seem so inappropriate?
For the audiences of the Peabody School’s email, I suggest that it mattered that an email about looking after one another, in response to human grief, was not actually written by a human. Because it substituted algorithmic approximations of what should be said at such a time, based on what others have said in similar instances, rather than “real” sentiments felt by an actual person in response to this specific situation, it may have seemed like this email about emotions was inauthentic or insincere. On a more abstract level, it may be that recipients felt that the message was not a task that should have been automated or made easier for the administrators: the subject matter – dealing with violence, death, and trauma – was difficult, and perhaps the use of ChatGPT implied that the administrators were not willing to do the hard work of reckoning with grief and loss. In these violations of social expectations, we could say that the administrators failed to do their work with integrity: they did not meet their responsibilities to their community for honest and authentic communication of their original ideas. And this mattered.
In this chapter, we will consider what it means to write with integrity in the age of generative artificial intelligence, or GAI. How do we understand these technologies, decide how and when to use them in our classes and beyond, and maintain our responsibilities – as students, professionals, community members, and consumers?
