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PulseReporter > Blog > Tech > I am a university writing professor. How college students ought to use AI this fall
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I am a university writing professor. How college students ought to use AI this fall

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Last updated: July 30, 2025 6:31 pm
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I am a university writing professor. How college students ought to use AI this fall
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Contents
Chatting with the archiveCreating your personal mini-archiveA not-quite writing tutor

Individuals attain for all types of metaphors to explain their relationship to AI. For some, AI is sort of a largely dependable intern. For others, it’s a digital assistant. More and more, chatbots like ChatGPT are shifting into the position of companion, therapist, even romantic accomplice. As a university writing professor, I’ve come to think about AI as a collaborator: an archive of information that talks again. However as a sober alcoholic myself, I can also’t assist however think about it as a high-functioning drunk: It might probably generally sound sensible even when it has no concept what it’s speaking about.

I can inform you tales concerning the methods AI has come by once I wanted it, saving me hours of time by doing mundane duties, proofreading my writing, or conversing about my newest analysis obsessions. However then there are these different instances when it lies with a cheery tone, when it appears to not perceive a phrase I’m saying however simply retains speaking quite than admit it’s improper or that it doesn’t have a solution. Like a number of weeks in the past, once I requested ChatGPT to show my written remarks for an educational convention right into a slide deck. My speak was about literary journalism, and it proudly supplied me a presentation about luxurious journey in Brazil.

Off-the-rails incidents like that give me loads of cautionary tales to share with my college students. However regardless that I believe AI undercuts a number of the most vital human causes to jot down, not all types of writing are the identical. To put in writing, we regularly must analysis first, and after we’ve written a draft we want crucial suggestions. As a substitute of taking a reactionary method to AI, I need to discover with my college students how it may be a helpful collaborator in that course of.

Chatting with the archive

A lot of faculty writing relies on analysis and studying, a course of that trains the thoughts to prepare data and assume logically. However utilizing new applied sciences for that course of doesn’t imply we’re not nonetheless doing crucial psychological work. Simply in my lifetime, these applied sciences have modified radically: We’ve gone from library card catalogs and microfiche to on-line databases like JSTOR and Google Scholar. These instruments don’t require any much less considering—they simply velocity up a number of the brainstorming and accumulating data, and so they increase the quantity of information we’re capable of contemplate.

As a result of I had witnessed this speedy digitization of analysis and writing instruments even earlier than AI, I’m extra inclined to think about methods AI is usually a collaborative analysis accomplice. In my area, for instance, literary students spend hours combing by main sources in libraries and archives. Digitization has already made these simpler to entry, and AI could make them simpler to research. 

Currently, I’ve realized we might consider speaking to an AI chatbot not like searching an archive, however like conversing with one. Earlier than we dive into extra intensive work, we will have a research-orienting chat with a “thoughts” that at the very least has a common concept of what’s on the market. A number of weeks in the past, I used my restricted entry to ChatGPT’s superior voice perform to ask if it thought that this concept of chatting with the archive was an inexpensive strategy to perceive what is occurring once I converse with AI. It answered, “Once you’re speaking to an AI like me, you’re accessing an enormous quantity of knowledge and patterns derived from human data as much as a sure level.” It additionally hedged a bit: “It’s vital to do not forget that whereas I can present data and insights primarily based on that data, I don’t possess human experiences or consciousness. So, whereas it would really feel like conversing with an enormous reservoir of information, it’s at all times good to think about the human perspective and context as properly.”

Nonetheless, as our dialog went on and my questions received extra pointed, I might ask it to offer references and locations I might go to do additional studying. Since that first tentative dialog, this pre-writing dialog with AI is changing into a part of my workflow. I’ve at all times discovered it simpler to work out my concepts by dialogue, however not many individuals are concerned about listening to my half-baked concepts. That’s the reason I’ve discovered that speaking by concepts is without doubt one of the greatest makes use of of AI for writers.

Creating your personal mini-archive

Whereas speaking with AI has confirmed useful for concept technology — and the truth that it retains a transcript makes it simpler to consult with later — there are a rising variety of AI-based instruments designed to assist with the extra intensive phases of analysis. On the finish of the autumn semester final 12 months, a pupil despatched me an e-mail asking if I’d heard of Google’s NotebookLM. I hadn’t, however once I opened the hyperlink, I received the idea virtually instantly. NotebookLM takes the concept of speaking to the archive to the following stage: The archive you chat with is one you assemble your self with sources for a selected mission, which the AI also can enable you to acquire to get began.

Mashable Pattern Report

Making ready for my latest convention speak, I dumped 25 PDFs that I had assembled and saved in Zotero, my favourite quotation supervisor, into NotebookLM’s interface. It shortly “learn” them and supplied a abstract that started, “These sources talk about unusual language philosophy, primarily specializing in the work of Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell, and its relationship to different philosophical and literary actions like pragmatism, transcendentalism, and deconstruction.” Under the abstract is a textual content entry area that encourages me to “Begin typing…” and gives some advised prompts like, “How does unusual language philosophy problem conventional philosophical approaches to which means?”

On the suitable aspect of the web page, in an space designated “Studio,” I am invited to create an audio overview, which takes the type of a podcast, full with two voices — one male, one feminine — bantering about my chosen subject. If I take advantage of Interactive Mode, I get handled like a caller on an outdated late night time radio present. I get compliments for my nice questions and responses primarily based on the paperwork I supplied. The podcast half isn’t nice but; it’s creepily pandering, however I can envision it getting higher and changing into extra helpful. NotebookLM has different useful options: It might probably create a “Thoughts Map,” examine information, briefing doc, FAQ, and timeline. I’ll proceed to make use of it and counsel college students accomplish that as properly.

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Meet business creators, contributors, and thought leaders who’ve paired with Mashable’s award-winning workers to publish first-person commentary from lived expertise.

A not-quite writing tutor

Yet another means that AI might show useful to pupil writers is in its capability to offer immediate suggestions on pupil writing. Once I requested ChatGPT about this idea, it inspired me to “consider AI like a writing tutor that’s accessible 24/7” with the caveat that it “lacks the private contact and nuanced understanding of particular person college students {that a} human tutor gives.” 

I pasted within the full textual content of one among my earlier Mashable tales and requested for ideas. It appeared well-versed in what we consult with in classroom peer workshop classes because the “praise sandwich”: criticism folded in between two compliments. 

It instructed me, “It is a compelling, eloquently written piece…your voice is genuine and reflective,” earlier than providing “some ideas to raise the piece additional.” Once more, it started with “Strengths to Maintain,” adopted by “Ideas for Enchancment,” together with “tighten the opening,” “strengthen transitions,” and “contemplate a stronger conclusion.” It additionally had a number of “minor type edits” to counsel. Lastly, it supplied an total ranking: 9/10.

Perhaps it was all of the compliments, however I received grasping. I pasted in one other essay (9.5/10) after which the convention speak I used to be engaged on. The general impression began off nice: “Your paper presents a compelling argument for the worth of literary journalism that focuses on the “unusual” and ‘quotidian.’” That’s true, although I by no means used the phrase “quotidian.” However then — I ought to have anticipated — it went off the rails. “The references to foundational figures (e.g., Bateson, Becker, Carey, Geertz, Tuchman) and modern examples (e.g., Kiese Laymon, Eliza Griswold, E. Tammy Kim) assist situate your argument inside a well-informed scholarly framework.” I don’t reference any of these figures as foundational or in any other case. 

I known as its consideration to this, and it mentioned I used to be “completely proper” and thanked me for pointing it out. Its clarification, nonetheless, was nonetheless baffling: “I mistakenly primarily based a part of my response on assumptions or cached concepts from different educational discussions of literary journalism, not your particular paper.” I examine literary journalism; the names ChatGPT dropped belong to writers, however they aren’t students in my area. Nonetheless, after I corrected it, we received again on observe and it supplied suggestions, once more using the praise sandwich. 

I’m undecided what to make of the truth that ChatGPT fared significantly better in opposition to my extra journalistic writing versus the tutorial, besides that it gives yet one more alternative for me to induce warning when serving to college students assume by acceptable makes use of of AI to enrich — quite than substitute — the writing course of.

Finally, I really like the notion of AI as conversant, albeit one thing that sometimes overindulges, main it to overly flatter and outright lie. I’m all for the notion that, in speaking with a chatbot, writers can approximate one thing like speaking to an entire host of human data, particularly with a software like NotebookLM that lets writers “educate” the AI a couple of subject earlier than discussing it.

AI as a collaborator appeals to me, even when I’ve to method it with a wholesome sense of skepticism, at all times ready for the following time it would let me down.

Subjects
Synthetic Intelligence

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