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January 29-31: Checking in and AI writing

I had the pleasure of hearing E.G. Kight, the Georgia Songbird, perform at our college on the 29th. 

It changed my life. I do not say that flippantly. 

If you get a chance to see her perform, take it. You won't be sorry. 

I have a day to myself to write. I often say I have a fiction brain and an expository brain. My fiction brain has not been exercised, or exorcised, in a long while and it is starting to come out in my dreams.  Back to work. 

Please tune into my podcast, Dialogues with Creators.  It's as good as any other "talk show" podcast you will listen to. Today I'm working on a solo on novel writing. 

February has arrived. January was long and cold and dark, but God is good. Our grandchild celebrated a year of life.

I have four more months of  full-time professional life.  This will include 1. training my replacement (chair) 2. hiring my replacement (professor line) 3. trying to get Cherokee taught at my college (my department covers languages) 4. wrapping up 47 years in academia. I hope never to grade another undergraduate paper. 

I have four or more gigs to speak on my writing in the next few months. I hope for more. The Townsend Prize will announce the five finalists, and I have no expectation of being on that list for a variety of reasons, but I still get to go to the gala and meet some cool people. 

Finally, next week I am giving a short talk on research I have been doing about student's responses to AI generated writing. I assign them to use AI writing tools to get output to one of three prompts, which they need to rephrase and experiment with, and then write a reflection on it.  I will code the responses formally, but for next week I am just doing a word frequency chart. Their responses so far can be summarized this way. 

  • They are intrigued but suspicious. 
  • Reluctant to use for academic work, beyond brainstorming. 
  • They think the output is contextless, robotic, soulless, well-written, and not "them." (but I remind them the prompts can make a difference.)
  • Generally, they opine that using it is unethical or ethically problematic

I didn't ask them to reflect on the ethics, not directly, but they did.  I appreciate that the do no want the AI to represent "them" or "their writing."  

More on this later after I do the formal coding. 


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