University of Kwazulu-Natal

First Drafts In The Ai Era By Marc Watkins Rhetorica

Bonisiwe Shabane
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first drafts in the ai era by marc watkins rhetorica

How will people compose text moving forward, now that every author working with a digital word processor and internet access can use generative AI? Many will likely opt to write traditionally as they did before, but some will use AI in partnership to draft. At this point, the methods a writer uses to develop a first draft feel like a dealer’s choice dilemma—ask AI to generate the draft for you, or bring some of your writing to the... If students use AI in their drafting process, I’m increasingly drawn toward advocating for the latter method. I don’t like the idea of students going to AI and prompting a first draft. I know some have argued that this could be a helpful method to fight the blank-page anxiety most writers feel.

Others view this as helping maturing writers by giving them a template or outline to help them organize and scaffold their ideas. I think there may be some value in those approaches, especially in terms of helping struggling students who might otherwise balk at writing, but all of these approaches assume a maturing writer will then... Those of us who’ve taught first-year writing likely raised a questioning eyebrow at that idea. Students struggle quite a bit when writing. For many, that struggle is a productive one, helping them exercise habits of thinking and self-inquiry, testing ideas, taking creative risks, and often failing. Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts lays bare this process with frank elegance.

I wish developers of LLMs would read it because as Lamott puts it, there’s a profound disconnect in how many fail to divorce the reality of the writing process from the end product: People tend to look at successful writers who are getting their books published and maybe even doing well financially and think that they sit down at their desks every morning feeling like a million... But this is just the fantasy of the uninitiated. That fantasy of the uninitiated doesn’t see the often maddening process that goes into shaping and forming the words and sentences on the page. Lamott does a wonderful job of articulating this struggle and demystifying it: Marc Watkins directs the AI Institute for Teachers and is an Assistant Director of Academic Innovation at the University of Mississippi, where he is a Lecturer in Writing and Rhetoric.

He has led research initiatives, exploring generative AI’s impact on student learning, training workshops for faculty on AI literacy, and multiple institution-wide AI institutes. His work with generative AI in education predates ChatGPT and he advocates approaching the technology’s integration in education with curious skepticism. When training faculty in applied artificial intelligence, he believes educators should be equally supported if they choose to work with AI or include friction to curb AI’s influence on student learning. His work with training faculty in AI literacy has been profiled in The Washington Post. He regularly writes about AI and education on his Substack Rhetorica. > tagged with #investigate, #teaching, #writing, #ai

unfinished everything is an original work / ongoing project (1997-present) by jeremy p. bushnell selection, arrangement, and original text available for creative reuse under this licensing arrangement Assistant Director of Academic Innovation at University of Mississippi Is there a way for students to write first drafts in our AI era using this new technology, while also maintaining their creative and critical thinking? 👇 in comments

Students first need to know the value of their own creative and critical thinking voices for themselves. Passionate about solving problems by asking the right questions across the policy and project life cycle. First drafts are where ideas are formed - where the narrative is developed- it is the most creative part before the polishing and refining begins. Navigating how AI impacts education, culture, and society. How will people compose text moving forward, now that every author working with a digital word processor and internet access can use generative AI? For the student who can't get started on the blank page, what would you think about "Coach me through a brainstorming process that will help me write my essay" instead of "Write a first...

I’ve been in situations where students come to office hours and want that coaching. I debate all the time if I’m actually helping or hindering the student in that context. The issue for many isn’t a lack of ability, but confidence. I would want to explore if an AI coach actually built a student’s confidence or if relying on a synthetic coach hindered their growth. Would an AI tell a student that they don’t need its help anymore and to trust themselves? Good questions!

Might some students come back to the same kind of coaching again and again, while others learn from the coaching and grow out of it over time? I'm guessing it would vary by student. FWIW, when I just tried this with ChatGPT, I got a friendly "You've got this!" at the end our interaction. https://chatgpt.com/share/89dff4a7-d8e8-4652-9142-12896eb92104 Anthropic’s Claude 3 is here, and with it comes much-hyped rhetoric of true artificial intelligence, which in turn leads to the predictable pattern of early adopters seeing ghosts of AGI in every output, followed... We should pause and remember the people at Anthropic and OpenAI see current transformer-based systems as mere stepping stones on the road to true Artificial Intelligence, and playing into boosting or bashing creates more...

OpenAI’s response to Elon Musk’s bizarre lawsuit reveals the true intention for these companies is to monetize AI assistants so that they fuel hype and criticism, which in turn create momentum and capital to... ChatGPT’s and Claude’s basic purpose is as a societal klaxon, a noise maker, a vehicle to drive interest to fund research into the most speculative science fiction fantasy in human history. Many of us (including me!) have added to this dynamic each time we’ve posted some example of an output we found astounding or took the time to note the critical lack of coherence, ethical... Claude 3 is not an example of AGI. It’s simply an improved version of a thing most people still haven’t found a use for in their daily life, and speculation is driving another version, begetting another then another, to fuel research. It’s like living in a world where a new iPhone comes out each spring, but everyone still uses landlines.

There’s this weird divide between certain developers building foundational models and, I guess you’d call ‘normies’ who don’t see a future where they log onto a device and merrily offload their labor, their skills,... The rationalist argument goes that if a machine can do it better, then what’s the point of a human's efforts? I think this is a much-misplaced idea that sweeps away humanity’s messiness for an often streamlined view of human nature. Recently, Scott Aaronson, one of OpenAI’s safety researchers, penned a sprawling post about generative AI’s impact on society and included the following bit about the future of pedagogy:

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