Creative Explorations
Creative explorations play around the edges of text generation technologies, asking students to consider the technical, ethical, and creative opportunities as well as limitations of using these technologies to create art and literature.
- Illuminating Manuscripts: Words, Images, and AI
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Amy Anderson
West Chester UniversityInspired by the interplay between words and images in medieval illuminated manuscripts, this assignment invites undergraduate students to work with an image-generating LLM to create their own illuminated manuscript of a passage from a course reading. By generating images that comment on and subvert the course reading, students are asked to explore the inventional relationship between words and images in both LLM prompts and multimodal compositions. Although the assignment was designed for a Medieval Women’s Culture course, it could be adapted to any rhetoric or composition course that considers multimodality.
- Ghostwriting: Your Voice in the Machine
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Carly Schnitzler and Annette Vee
Johns Hopkins University; University of PittsburghIn this assignment, students explore a uniquely human topic of their choosing and co-compose essays with LLMs over multiple iterative drafts. The model for this assignment is Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts.” Through the writing process, we also examine how authorial power shifts with technology use, the utility and limitations of these tools, and the myriad ethical questions that arise with the use of AI in writing.
- ChatGPT and Poetic Mechanics
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Tristan B Taylor
University of SaskatchewanThis two-part activity asks students to interrogate assumptions about poetry, broadly construed, based on their preconceived notions and prior knowledge of poetry. In the first part of the activity and assessment, students are presented with a poem composed by generative AI and asked to define how the text is a poem. The instructor should guide the students in a discussion about what constitutes poetry. In the first part of the activity, students should not be made aware that the poem under discussion is composed by generative AI. The instructor should encourage students to close read the text. In the second part of the activity at the end of the term, students are presented with the same poem and asked to discuss the poetic mechanisms employed by the generative AI. The instructor poses the following questions: How does generative AI conceptualize poetry? Can generative AI compose poetry for an audience? Is generative AI capable of producing poetry? Through this activity, students gain a greater critical understanding of poetry, audience, and the rhetoric and mechanics of poetry, as well as AI literacy. I have taught this exercise successfully in two separate courses, and students have responded positively on both occasions.