In defense of undergraduate writing: Generative AI and undergraduate reading / writing

Thursday, 10 October 2024, 13:00-14:30; Join the meeting online: https://bit.ly/AI-Seminar4

This seminar is envisaged as a Faculty forum for exploring the impact of generative AI on undergraduate reading and writing in the humanities. Two relatively brief presentations, by Taryn Bernard and Lloyd Hill, will introduce the topic and hopefully stimulate fruitful discussion…

Taryn: The complex and multifaceted concept of ‘identity’ is an important component of any sociolinguistic understanding of language and language use (see, for example, Holmes 1997, Bucholtz 1999, Norton 2010, Wodak 2012 and Clark 2013). In this talk, I investigate and problematise the notion of ‘identity’ in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) before moving on to consider what this means for academic writing and our own pedagogical practices.
Lloyd: Generative AI presents a particular reading-writing challenge to the humanities, where disciplines are typically framed in terms of canonical literatures and a commitment to academic writing as authorial stance. This presentation unfolds in three sections: a formulation of the undergraduate writing problem; a brief discussion of the post-ChatGPT macro context of the problem; and a discussion of my situated response to the problem, i.e. reading/writing modalities in my second-year Sociology of Communication module.