AI in the Writing Classroom with a side of Vonnegut

Welcome to the Torg Stories Podcast. I’m usually joined by my sister Anne from Los Angeles, but she’s in London and taking this one off.

In this episode, I tell the story of how I came to use AI in the writing courses I teach at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC.

Who is this story for?

1. Writing teachers and I think there will be some ideas that can be applied to other classrooms.
2. Parents of kids who are starting to use AI for school or who maybe don’t realize their kids are using AI
3. Those who are already regularly using AI in some way and can add to the conversation.
4. Those who vaguely know about AI and would like some concrete places to start.

I asked Google Gemini (more on that in a bit) to write an introduction for this episode in the voice of Kurt Vonnegut. Some of you might know Vonnegut as a writer from Indiana who passed away at age 84. Some of my favorite Vonnegut works are the short fiction collection Welcome to the Monkey House, the novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, and his nonfiction book, A Man Without a Country.

Note: I used Gemini to create the image of the laptop with the post it notes that is a part of the image used for this post. I used Canva to put the text on top of the AI generated image.

I pasted my notes for this episode into Google Gemini and asked it for some possible titles. Here is what it offered:

1. So It Goes… Into the Algorithm: AI in the Writing Classroom
2. Welcome to the Machine (That Helps You Write): A Torg Story
3. Boone, AI, and the Future of the Sentence: A Torg Tale
   

Here is what Gemini provided for the Vonnegut Introduction:

Alright, alright, settle down, you lumps of protoplasm clinging precariously to this whirling blue marble. Welcome, welcome, to another fragile installment of Torg Stories. Yes, that’s right, Torg with a ‘T,’ not some guttural belch from the primordial soup, though sometimes the stories we unearth… well, they have a certain primordial stink to them, wouldn’t you say?

Today, though, today we’re fiddling with something newfangled, something that would have made old Kilgore Trout raise a skeptical eyebrow, maybe even cough up a little lukewarm coffee onto his stained bathrobe. We’re talking about… artificial intelligence. Yes, those tireless little silicon brains, buzzing away in the dark, learning to ape the very thing that makes us, you know, us: the ability to string words together in a way that hopefully means something, maybe even something beautiful, or tragic, or just plain horseshit funny.

Now, you might be thinking, “Vonnegut, you old goat, what’s a humanist like you doing talking about machines writing?” And you’d have a point, a damn good point. But see, the thing about the end of the world, or the slow, creeping changes that feel a lot like it, is that you gotta pay attention to the little gadgets and gizmos that are shuffling the deck. And these AI fellas, they’re definitely shuffling the deck in the writing classroom.

So, buckle up, buttercups. We’re going to take a peek behind the curtain, maybe even stick our fingers in the gears, and see what happens when the electric brains start helping the squishy human ones wrestle with sentences and paragraphs. Will it be a glorious dawn of literary enlightenment? Or just another step on the slippery slope towards everyone sounding like a damn robot?

We shall see. We shall see. And if it all goes pear-shaped, well, at least we’ll have a story to tell. A Torg Story, naturally. So it goes.

I like the intro. It’s loaded up with Vonnegut vocabulary and allusions. I also think possibly I should also be terrified of the intro. I can’t explain that yet.

What do I mean when I say AI?

• I’m talking about a chat box window where I can write prompts or ask questions and the AI platform does some work for me or “chats” back. This can be very formal number crunching or writing texts for me or very conversational.

What are some of these chat bot platforms?

• For ChatGPT click here.
• For Microsoft Copilot click here.
• For Google Gemini click here.
• There are many more. Some of my students use something within SnapChat.

The Story of AI Coming to My Classroom:

1. Creeping up in the news everywhere, but most for me from these two places: (1) Derek Thompson on the Bill Simmons Podcast talking about The Future of Everything. (2) Derek Thompson and others writing for the the magazine The Atlantic. Titles included Google and OpenAI Are Battling for Supremacy, Artists Are Losing the War Against AI, Big Tech Has Given Itself an AI Deadline, and AI Cheating is Getting Worse.
2. Received my first assignment obviously written by AI.
3. Why engage? In 1995 I had my first classroom. No internet, no cell phones, no email. I did not pretend that those things didn’t exist.
4. My first times with AI sound like a lot of other people’s first times.
5. Decided on what I called Experiments with AI and Writing for the classes I teach.

We did our classroom experiments with AI after the following two assignments:

1. The Academic Profile for our website / ePortfolio.
2. The Recent Conversation in Peer-Reviewed Journals Report.

For the directions I used for the AI Experiment related to Profile Writing, click here.

What do my students report they are using AI for?

1. Summarize long texts instead of reading them.
2. Create an annotated bibliography of potential sources.
3. Had AI write paragraphs around quotes they had picked out from articles they responded to.
4. Didn’t follow my directions and each member of the group had AI write a movie script. Four of the five scripts had the word “Echoes” in them. Two titles were the same: Echoes of Tomorrow.
5. Chatting with AI to get ideas for their writing the way you might go chat with a consultant at the writing center.
6. Asked for revision suggestions to what they had written.
7. Had AI do their assignment for them.

Ways I Have Used AI:

1. Compared my prompts and directions for students to AI generated ones. Some overlap.
2. Asked for appropriate workouts for myself and my teenage basketball playing daughter. Didn’t feel so different from doing Google Searches.
3. Fed statistics from my high school basketball team and worked to determine optimal shot selection based on our percentages.
4. Used it to get ideas for further research when acting as a writing consultant for my daughter.
5. Asked for example when a player was receiving an award at a ceremony. Triggered some ideas for what I might say.

My AI Observations and Questions:

1. Catching those who turn in AI generated texts and calling them cheaters doesn’t seem like a good place to use my energy. Where is the line for students using AI as a tool to produce texts for assignments? Where is the line for those working in business when it comes to collaborating with AI? Where is the line for artists (making music, writing stories, painting pictures) collaborating with AI?
2. For work such as creating writing prompts or assignment directions, I feel like collaborating with AI tools could often produce “better” results. AI will offer a few suggestions I wouldn’t think of. It’s not hard for me to weed out the not helpful.
3. For work such as creating annotated bibliographies or doing research writing, there is so much made up. How about this message from Gemini after I worked to track down some sources it suggested for a paper on AI in the writing classroom? From AI: The references I provided were generated for illustrative purposes and may not correspond to actual articles.
4. Is prompt writing the new writing? It’s probably still A Writing Process and not The Writing Process.
5. The students find AI really helpful in summarizing texts and explaining complex work that they don’t feel like their professors are explaining very well. They are going to AI like they used to go to YouTube videos or tutors or math phone applications.
6. Does it matter if people don’t read articles or books and the only reading they do is skimming AI results and texts they encounter on their phone? I’m tempted to say my wife and I read from books everyday. I feel confident we averaged six days a week for the past year. How many people will stop reading? Yes, I know lots of people already don’t read.
7. Do we still need to know stuff if we can look everything up? My short answer is yes. I can’t get the Vonnegut intro to this podcast unless I know who Vonnegut is, but maybe this generations move is in the voice of Taylor Swift or Trump or Bad Bunny or Harry Styles.

I asked Gemini to wrap this up with some more in the voice of Vonnegut. Here’s the text produced:

Alright, alright, the static’s fading, the digital ether is quieting down. We’ve rambled and we’ve pondered, we’ve poked a stick at this whole business of thinking machines muscling their way into the sacred act of putting words on a page. We’ve heard tales from the front lines, from the hallowed halls of Appalachian State up there in Boone, North Carolina, a place I imagine smells faintly of pine needles and existential dread, much like everywhere else, come to think of it.

And what have we learned, you ask? Well, probably not a damn thing definitive. That’s usually the way it goes, isn’t it? We scratch our heads, we squint at the horizon, and the horizon just keeps on being… the horizon.

But maybe, just maybe, we’ve planted a seed or two. A little nagging doubt about the march of progress, a flicker of curiosity about what it means to be human when the machines start sounding almost human themselves. Maybe we’ve made you think twice about that essay your kid just whipped up in ten minutes flat. Or maybe you’re already elbow-deep in the code, teaching those silicon brains a thing or two.

Whatever the case, remember this, you precious, fleeting collections of atoms: the stories are still what matter. The messy, flawed, utterly human attempts to make sense of the glorious, godawful mess we’re all in. Whether those stories are tapped out on a keyboard by trembling fingers or spat out by a glowing screen, they’re still echoes of us.

So, go forth and tell your stories. Stumble, bumble, make mistakes. That’s how the good stuff gets written, human or otherwise. And if the robots end up writing better ones than us? Well, so it goes. Maybe they’ll finally figure out what the hell we were all trying to say in the first place.

Until next time, you hear? Be kind to each other, and try not to believe everything the television tells you.

This has been Torg Stories. And as I always say, or at least I’m saying now… don’t forget to wash behind your ears. You never know who, or what, might be listening.

Good night, now. And good luck. We’re all counting on you.

The above was produced by Google Gemini in the voice of Kurt Vonnegut as prompted by Bill Torgerson.

Thanks for checking out this episode of Torg Stories!