AI Area 49 Use Case: Introduction to AI in a WRDS Class – Using AI to Supplement the Writing Process
AI Area 49 Use Case: Introduction to AI in a WRDS Class – Using AI to Supplement the Writing Process
Beth Caruso
As a librarian in Area 49, the library’s collection of innovation and creation spaces, I facilitated a
class session for WRDS 1103, Writing & Inquiry in Academic Contexts.
During this course session, the instructor aimed to focus on how AI could effectively be integrated into the writing process, offering both creative and practical benefits.
Overall, she was interested in having students complete the task of writing (rather than relying on AI), employing other creative ideas that would give students new ways to use AI for their own writing processes, and helping students think critically about when it may or may not be appropriate to use AI in various contexts.
We began with a quick introduction to generative AI and general use cases, such as generating prompts for chatbots to answer, help with summarizing concepts, and moved on to the basics of ethical AI usage. Because we would be discussing the more creative uses of AI, we then viewed high-level examples of AI usage, such as using AI for sound detection, installation art that used AI to visualize alternate realities of nature, and a trained LLM that helped remove biased language from medical curricula. Although we would be talking about process work for the day’s activity, I wanted to make sure that students who had not yet been introduced to AI usage past chatbots could get a better idea of the many ways in which AI could be used for effective results before we moved on.
The core of the class was to explore how AI can be used effectively in the writing process. In preparation for the class session, I had a conversation with ChatGPT about how it could help with the writing process. Although I asked for creative uses, it gave me more mainstream applications that most people had heard of, such as help with citations, and finding sources, which we know are often incorrect or hallucinated. I continued to press for creative uses, asking about “creativity” and “nontraditional” and “alternative” uses, and through the various suggestions, developed a fairly lengthy list of possibilities for using AI in the writing process. During the class, we identified the variety of suggestions that the AI came up with as “green flags” and “red flags.” We also labeled some as yellow, as they could be helpful or a hindrance, depending on the situation. For example, using AI to help with outlining a paper could be a great help in pulling ideas together, but it could also prevent a writer from making discoveries about topical or conceptual relationships or could outline the topics in a way that doesn’t make sense to the writer, causing the process of composing to be more difficult. Through these discussions, we came to many conclusions about the contexts in which AI would be both helpful and ethical to use during the writing process, as well as the opposite.
We moved on to the creative methods of supplementing the writing process. These ideas consisted of using AI for visual organization of ideas (or concept mapping) and prompting for
historical context for a more in-depth understanding of the issue. However, others got to the heart of the writing process itself. Using AI to record and transcribe voice memos or to convert spoken text into type for a faster drafting process can help tremendously for people who lose their ideas once they’ve said them out loud and can also be used for accessibility purposes. AI can help the writer incorporate mindful writing practices, but can tailor them to the specific person. This would not only be helpful for simply enhancing focus, but could also help writers get over blocks at certain points in their writing process.
After hearing an assortment of ideas, students worked with Microsoft Copilot to test out a few of their ideas. They could:
- Explore one of the suggestions from AI in more depth
- Explore how AI might help with a specific writing process block
- Explore the various lenses through which a specific idea could be approached
- Use other creative approaches they wished to explore.
Some of them had not used generative AI before, so this was also a time for them to experiment with developing prompts. During share-outs, it was evident that students discovered a variety of new ideas that they could use for their writing processes. Overall, the class was a success, allowing the time for critical thinking, experimentation, and the discovery of new possibilities.
