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| This student guide to AI has been circulating widely in the past few months. It begins with a provocative quote by an economist: “AI won’t take your job. It’s someone using AI who will take your job.” The jury is obviously still out on this claim, but students are hearing it loud and clear, and I imagine their parents are as well. I had a conversation last week with a student who parroted it.
This begs the question, are we doing students a disservice if we don’t teach students how to use gen AI as a writing tool? Here’s what I told the student I talked with last week. If gen AI actually proves useful for most professional writing tasks (and the jury is still very much out on that question as well), those who will be most skilled at using it are those who know how to write well in the first place. Students who become dependent on AI because they don’t develop all of the so-called “soft skills” we teach in the liberal arts (which are in fact the hardest skills to teach and learn), are going to be very limited in their career prospects. Moreover, prompt engineering is itself a writing task that, like all writing tasks, requires the writer to consider context, purpose, and audience as they compose, so in teaching students to be adaptable writers in our writing across the curriculum program, we are actually (albeit surreptitiously) giving them the skills they need to use LLMs as writing tools. The challenge we face is in motivating students to do the tasks involved in writing assignments themselves rather than turning to gen AI so they develop those skills. But more on that in the next issue. In the meantime, here is an Inside Higher Ed article, “Sending the Wrong Message to Students on AI,” that responds to the student guide to AI and takes a related but different approach. |