WRITING IN AN AGE OF AI

Course Approach

A course designed for Humanities students to better understand how LLM’s function and the various historical, political, and social issues behind the development of these technologies. Part history-of-consciousness, part technical, part literary investigation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, course operates as an introduction to how AI systems and how they have radically transformed how we think about practice.

Course is split into three sections, where the first section is exploring questions of ‘intelligence’, theory, and the development of AI. A smaller second section is oriented around technical writing of these systems, where we explore coding ELIZA, how ‘adversarial poetry’ can jailbreak some systems, and how AI runs off of code written out in strings. A third section explores the labor and political questions surrounding AI, specifically how it changes the writing market and what it means to be a writer in an age of ‘slop’ and automation.

Along the way, students read Frankenstein as a text that confronts the reader with another version of consciousness. They handwrote (with glee, at times!) journals on the chapters and easily connected the ways in which Shelley’s Promethean warning applies to our present.

Signature Work

A course long project was reading Frankenstein, at the end of which students used Co-Pilot studio to create their own AI assistant. The Assistant could be anything, and I created Frank, our class TA; Frank was trained on the readings in the class and could pick out specific quotes, themes, or assignment help. He also was full of Frankenstein puns, so when a student would ask him to complete an assignment, he would demand a bride in exchange (‘make me another AI assistant’).

Students own AI chatbots helped them understand the ‘guts’ of an LLM, as we built them from model–>description–>training data–> prompt. Students then asked the chatbot to perform the journal assignment and pull out where they though training data or model influenced some of the writing the bot did. (Pictured right)

What really stood out was the student journals–fully completed, some went for four, fives pages past the minimum 1.5 they were assigned. Multiple students doodled, made notes, and expressed creativity outside of the rigor of keeping track of their reading. It was reaffirming to see students desire to have shared experiences, particularly reading, and sharing ideas with one another. The inspiration for handwriting came not from a surveillance mechanism but a focus on evading digital capture. Matt Seybold’s American Vandal podcast,originally focused on Mark Twain has used Twain Studies as a jumping off point to discuss our Technofeudal moment and the importance of reading and mass literacy for our cultural health. Seybold’s coinage of ‘Print is a Rent Strike’ influenced the usage of handwritten assignments.

Students being not only ok, but (gasp) enjoying writing for me was very pedagogically fulfilling and reaffirming of the covenant between student and professor. I’ll ask you to do many things you’ve never done before, you try, and we sort it out in class to learn more about ourselves.

Newspapers Worse Than Dead, But Print Is A Rent Strike (A Tale of Today, Episode #15)