Our Writing Program colleagues discuss AI, ChatGPT, and emerging Large Language Models, including their potentials and pitfalls for the doing and teaching writing and rhetoric, as well as the relation to writing program administration. This episode, like Episode 8 last year with Jonathan Alexander, is part of the 4th annual “The Big Rhetorical Podcast Carnival,” hosted by Charles Wood. This year’s theme is “AI: Applications and Trajectories.” Here, we hope to illuminate through an extensive discussion the uncertain future in regard to powerful technologies that will likely reshape writing practice for writers, teachers, and students alike.

Attendees

Stephanie Bower

Zen Dochterman

Nik De Dominic

Mark Marino

Tanvi Patel

Maddox Pennington

Patti Taylor

Ryan Leack

Ellen Wayland-Smith

Notable Quotes from Our Colleagues

Nik De Dominic: In the same way that COVID-19 presented all of these challenges to us from an instruction point of view, I think LLMs will do the same. It will be up to faculty to familiarize themselves and create literacy for something that they most likely had no idea was on the landscape a year ago. And we really want to empower instructors to make choices that get their students somewhere.

Patti Taylor: I think it's really important to have a mix of people who are experimenting and dealing with these issues and trying things, especially here in these early stages so that [instructors] have the ethos to be able to persuade and say, here's what it's doing to our students. Here's what's useful.

Mark Marino: I think we should not ban [AI/LLMs]. I think we should bring these things in. I think we should build a boat and not a wall to when the flood comes, which is here.

Stephanie Bower:

I think we again want to be looking at these things and all of their complexities, and we don't know what's going to happen, but I think, rather than being pulled over and drawn into it, either with the sense of enthusiasm or doom, I think we also have to recognize that we have agency, too. The future isn't inevitable, and we can create it.

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Erscheinungs­datum: 13.10.2023, 02:46:33