Designing Writing Assignments to Work with AI

Designing Writing Assignments to Work with AI

With the growing use of AI, writing instructors across the world are looking for innovative ways to incorporate ethical and productive use of the technology while fostering the foundational skills of reading, writing, and critical thinking in college-level writing courses. As AI-driven writing becomes more and more ubiquitous around us, it is critical for students to understand the limits and shortcomings of AI-produced writing while learning how to harness its capabilities to improve their own writing skills. With AI models readily accessible to students today, it is important for writing instructors to revisit the purpose of writing instruction and to adapt their writing assignments in a way that guides students toward understanding the significance and function of writing in the AI age. 

Looking to create a writing assignment that inhibits the use of AI-- check out our companion article.

Here are a few suggestions for writing instructors to create assignments that encourage students to interact with AI.

  1. Generating ideas and outline: Ask students to generate 3 ideas or outlines for their writing assignments and evaluate each one of them for their accuracy, creativity, and comprehensiveness.  Students will observe how AI can help with the brainstorming process while understanding the limitations of its output evidenced through the variances in the multiple outlines. 

  2. Revisions with AI: Students are asked to submit their writing drafts to ChatGPT for revision, followed by their evaluation of the edits. In more advanced assignments, students can tinker with providing precise prompts to ChatGPT for edits and revision, focusing on factors such as tone, audience, and clarity, followed by an analysis of how well different prompts worked to achieve the objective of the assignment. Students will learn how to receive edits and feedback from AI and develop skills to discern them for their usefulness in their own work. 

  3. Critiquing ChatGPT responses: Provide writing assignment prompts to ChatGPT and critique its output. Students will learn how to critically evaluate text written by AI, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. 

  4. Fact-checking: Students will ask ChatGPT to provide sources for the writing assignment. Cross-check each source with the UCLA Library catalogue or a similar database (such as WorldCat). Attach screenshots of ChatGPT output as well as each source found in the library catalogue.  A more advanced version of this assignment can require students to ask ChatGPT for quotes on a particular topic from a specific source. Students then crosscheck the quote with the original source. The goal of this assignment is for students to learn the significant issues of credibility in the information provided by AI as well as be cognizant of the so-called ‘hallucination’ tendencies in AI. 

  5. Crafting diverse prompts: Ask students to craft diverse prompts by experimenting with language, tone, and structure and comment on the outcome provided by AI. Students will gain immediate feedback on how different phrasing or framing of a prompt can yield varied and sometimes unexpected responses. This trial-and-error process deepens their understanding of how prompt construction influences output, fostering greater rhetorical awareness.

  6. Genre-mixing: Ask students to use AI to rewrite an academic argument as a news article, poem, or dialogue. Students will learn to recognize genre conventions and how they affect meaning. 

Ultimately, it is important for the instructors and students to understand how LLMs (Large Language Models) function and how AI creativity differs from human creativity. Understanding this difference can allow students to be cognizant of the differences between the ‘functional’ creativity of LLMs against the ‘originality’ of human creativity. 

Additional Readings:

  1. https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/collections/textgened/ai-literacy/transforming-writing-assignments-with-ai/

  2. https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/collections/textgened/ai-literacy/critical-assessment-and-analysis-exercise/