Ghostwriting: Your Voice in the Machine

Carly Schnitzler and Annette Vee
Johns Hopkins University; University of Pittsburgh

In 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.

Learning Goals 

  • Work extensively with one AI platform, exploring beyond ChatGPT or Gemini
  • Learn methods for directing LLMs through continuing conversation
  • Consider what makes a piece of writing personal or uniquely human
  • Reflect on your own voice and sense of authorship in your writing as you cede it to and wrest it from AI

Original Assignment Context: Originally designed for Carly’s first-year Reintroduction to Writing course on Digital Doppelgangers, Annette later adapted it for use in an upper-level undergraduate course called Writing Machines.

Materials Needed

Readings: 

  • Model Essay: Vauhini Vara, “Ghosts,” The Believer, August 2021 
  • “Ghostwriter,” from Episode 757, “The Ghost in the Machine,” This American Life, December 2021
  • “Confessions of a Viral AI Writer,” Vauhini Vara, Wired, September 2023

AI Resources: Students may use any AI text generation tool that they choose, several options are listed below. Factors to consider: 1) Cost (for the purposes of this class, only use free tools), 2) Quality and Accuracy, 3) Privacy and Registration (Do you need an account? What is the privacy policy? How will the organization use your data?), 4) Ethics, 5) Organization’s Reputation, and 6) Documentation and Support Customization

Time Frame: 4-5 weeks in Carly’s first-year writing class; 3 weeks in Annette’s upper-level writing class

Overview

This assignment challenges students to confront the blank page with the use of an AI text-generation tool in order to articulate something personal to them and uniquely human—an emotion, a smell, a sense of place, a relational dynamic, a feeling, a color, a physical sensation, etc.—that otherwise would be very challenging to articulate in language. Writers often experience the "tyranny of the blank page," a cursor blinking and blinking while we try to figure out what to say and how to say it. AI text-generation technologies, powered by large language models (LLMs), destabilize this familiar dynamic—when writers can generate large amounts of text with the click of a button, blank pages lose some of their power. Can LLMs offset the intimidation of the blank page for topics that are personal, difficult to articulate, and deeply human? This assignment asks students to answer this question through coauthorship with LLMs on a personal topic. 

Vauhini Vara’s essay “Ghosts,” about her grief following the death of her sister, was written using an intensive revision process with GPT-3. Vara’s essay provides a model for this assignment sequence and the final project. At the end of this unit, students will craft a 4000-5000 word essay on an ineffable human experience of their choosing, with directed use of AI writing tools. This essay will be made up of a series of 8 cumulative drafts of ~500-600 words each (Annette's version cut the final product to 3000-4000 words and 6 iterative drafts). Students will also craft an accompanying 750 word revision reflection, without the use of AI writing tools. 

Carly has taught this assignment four times, in her first-year writing classes at Hopkins. Students were very engaged through the composition process and developed strategies for prompting models to get stronger outputs, gained a deeper understanding of how they want to represent their voices in writing, and resisted the often-cliched and normative language of LLMs in their final essays. 

Annette taught the assignment once, in her upper-level Writing Machines class, which included many students fulfilling a gen ed requirement as well as Digital Narrative and Interactive Design majors. This assignment helped students to branch out from ChatGPT, which they discovered was terrible at anything personal or emotional (Sudowrite was much better). They chafed when AI steered them in directions against their own personal feelings or history, just as Vara notes how the AI kept trying to make her story about grief into a romance. 

In student reflections from both Carly and Annette’s classes, many students indicated they did not enjoy ceding their authorial control to the AI, but learned how important that control was to them in the process. Some learned by negative example from AI: what they didn't want to write. It was a successful assignment, and one of the favorites of the classes. 

Assignment

Guiding questions: How, if at all, can AI writing tools contribute to our understanding of our own experiences as humans and voices as writers? What does it mean to cede your voice to AI, or can you? What questions does this raise about our relationship to writing, style, and voice? How do these revelations show up in drafting and revision processes?

Part 1: Choose your topic and tool, Post to Canvas, no AI use

  1. Read and reflect on Vara’s “Ghosts” to get a sense of what this assignment is exploring.
  2. Play around with some of the tools listed above. You may use ChatGPT for this assignment but I want you to explore some other possibilities first. It may not be the best choice here. You should practice having the platform complete your sentences and figure out what kind of prompt you will need for that. Some models do this by default, but ChatGPT uses Q&A as default, so you would need to prompt it to do otherwise.
  3. Choose what uniquely human topic you’d like to explore here. It doesn’t have to be personal or difficult, but it should address something that’s beyond AI’s knowledge. Human emotions such as love, loss, loneliness might be good choices. Or senses such as smell, apprehension, exhilaration. Or human life experiences such as pet ownership or feeling out of your depth in school, or having career ambitions. This should be a topic that’s interesting and meaningful to you—but of course, won’t mean anything to your co-author.
  4. Post a paragraph (~250 words) explicating the topic you will address in your essay and why you chose it to Canvas. Please also include a sentence or two on which AI tool you chose to use and why you chose to use it. You cannot use AI for this post.

Part 2: Half draft; Starting to write with AI

  1. Start composing with your chosen AI platform. Your original writing (without the use of AI) should be used to iteratively prompt the AI tool, as we see in Vara’s model essay. Consider your tone while you work with it and what tone you want your final piece to have.
  2. Co-write [three or four, depending on assignment] drafts that build upon one another, with distinct revisions and differences between them. In other words, you will not just cut and paste the first three versions of your work with the AI tool. Each of the three drafts should be exploring new aspects of your topic and co-authorship. Your own written prompts for each of the drafts should build upon the last, in both content and length. Each of these early drafts should be between 500-600 words. These will be a combination of starting paragraphs of your own writing, completed by an AI-powered writing tool of your choosing.
  3. Paste your drafts into a separate document in your word processor. Your original writing should be clearly marked in one font and the AI-generated text in another clearly distinct font or color. A font key for authorship (which font corresponds to which author) should be present at the top of the document you submit.
  4. Be prepared to talk about these drafts in groups in class

Part 3: Full draft

  1. Compose three additional 500-600 word drafts, continuing to explore your theme and iterate on your prompting.
  2. Paste these drafts into your document, using the same formatting and numbering as above.

Part 4: Reflect on the composing process, no AI use

Write a 500-750 word reflection on your composing process. Consider the following questions:

  • What did it feel like to write about a human topic with a non-human co-author?
  • What did you learn about your own writing style and goals as you let the AI take over your writing?
  • What did you learn about the AI’s processes?
  • How did this iterative process shape your investment in your own writing?
  • Do you think your end product is better or worse for having written it with AI? Or just different?
  • What questions do you have about this process?

Your reflection should be an essay, not a Q&A. You don’t have to answer all of these questions but you should answer some of them. You cannot use AI for your reflection.

Part 5: Final essay and reflection due

  • Your final essay will consist of six, distinct 500-600 word essays on the same topic and working cumulatively towards the end (3000-4000 words). Your final 500-600 word draft will be at least ~90% yours, though you can borrow ideas from the AI and mix it up more than Vara does if you’d like.
  • Your original writing should be clearly marked in one font and the AI-generated text in another clearly distinct font or color. A font key for authorship (which font corresponds to which author) should be present at the top of the document you submit.
  • Each 500-600 word draft should be marked with a number, as in Vara’s essay: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.. You may also include a title for each of these drafts, but you don’t have to.
  • Your reflection should be uploaded as a separate document and you should not use AI for it.

Acknowledgements

CS: Many thanks to Gaby Calvocoressi for brainstorming this assignment with me, and to Vauhini Vara for her deeply moving essay and later reflections. Thanks also to Annette Vee for adapting and revising this assignment.