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As the writing across the curriculum and writing center coordinator on my campus, faculty ask me how to detect their students\u2019 use of generative AI and how to prevent it. My response to both questions is that we can\u2019t. <\/p>\n
In fact, it\u2019s becoming increasingly hard to not <\/em>use generative AI. Back in 2023, according to a student survey conducted on my campus, some students were nervous to even create ChatGPT accounts for fear of being lured into cheating.\u202f It used to be that a student had to seek it out, create an account and feed it a prompt. Now that generative AI is integrated into programs we already use\u2014Word (Copilot), Google Docs (Gemini) and Grammarly\u2014it\u2019s there beckoning us like the chocolate stashed in my cupboard does around 9\u00a0p.m. every night. <\/p>\n A recent GrammarlyGO advertisement emphasizes the seamless integration of generative AI. In the first 25 seconds of this GrammarlyGO ad, a woman\u2019s confident voice tells us that GrammarlyGO is \u201ceasy to use\u201d and that it\u2019s \u201ceasy to write better and faster\u201d with just \u201cone download\u201d and the \u201cclick of a button.\u201d The ad also seeks to remove any concerns about generative AI\u2019s nonhumanness and detectability: it\u2019s \u201cpersonalized to you\u201d; \u201cunderstands your style, voice and intent so your writing doesn\u2019t sound like a robot\u201d; and is \u201ccustom-made.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re in control,\u201d and \u201cGrammarlyGO helps you be the best version of yourself.\u201d\u202f The message: Using GrammarlyGO\u2019s generative AI to write is not cheating, it\u2019s self-improvement.\u202f <\/p>\n This ad calls to my mind the articles we see every January targeting those of us who want to develop healthy habits. The ones that urge us to sleep in our gym clothes if we want to start a morning workout routine. If we sleep in our clothes, we\u2019ll reduce obstacles to going to the gym. Some of the most popular self-help advice focuses on the role of reducing friction to enable us to build habits that we want to build. Like the self-help gurus, GrammarlyGO\u2014and all generative AI companies\u2014are strategically seeking to reduce friction by reducing time (\u201cfaster), distance (it\u2019s \u201cwhere you write\u201d) and effort (it\u2019s \u201ceasy\u201d!).\u202f <\/p>\n Where does this leave us? Do we stop assigning writing? Do we assign in-class writing tests? Do we start grading AI-produced assignments by providing AI-produced feedback?\u202f <\/p>\n Nope.\u202f <\/p>\n If we recognize the value of writing as a mode of thinking and believe that effective writing requires revision, we will continue to assign writing. While there is a temptation to shift to off-line, in-class timed writing tests, this removes the opportunity for practicing revision strategies and disproportionately harms students with learning disabilities, as well as English language learners.\u202f\u202f <\/p>\n Instead, like Grammarly, we can tap into what the self-help people champion and engage in what organizational behavior researchers Hayagreeva Rao and Robert I. Sutton call \u201cfriction fixing.\u201d In The Friction Project<\/em> (St. Martin\u2019s Press, 2024), they explain how to \u201cthink and live like a friction fixer who makes the right things easier and the wrong things harder.\u201d We can\u2019t ban AI, but we can friction fix by making generative AI harder to use and by making it easier to engage in our writing assignments. This does not mean making our writing assignments easier! The good news is that this approach draws on practices already central to effective writing instruction.\u202f <\/p>\n After 25 years of working in writing centers at three institutions, I\u2019ve witnessed what stalls students, and it is rarely a lack of motivation. The students who use the writing center are invested in their work, but many can\u2019t start or get stuck. Here are two ways we can decrease friction for writing assignments:\u202f <\/p>\n There are so many ways we faculty (unintentionally) make our assignments uninviting: the barrage of words on a page, the lack of white space, our practice of leading with requirements (citation style, grammatical correctness), the use of SAT words or discipline-specific vocabulary for nonmajors: All this can signal to students that they don\u2019t belong even before they\u2019ve gotten started. Sometimes, our assignment prompts can even sound annoyed, as our frustration with past students is misdirected toward current students and manifests as a long list of don\u2019ts. The vibe is that of an angry Post-it note left for a roommate or partner who left their dishes in the sink\u00a0\u2026 again!<\/p>\n What if we were to reconceive our assignments as invitations to a party instead?\u202f When we design a party invitation, we have particular goals: We want people to show up, to leave their comfort zones and to be open to engaging with other people. Isn\u2019t that what we want from our students when we assign a writing project?\u202f <\/p>\n If we designed writing assignments as invitations rather than assessments, we would make them visually appealing and use welcoming language.\u202f Instead of barraging students with all the requirements, we would foreground the enticing facets of the assignment. De-emphasize APA and MLA formatting and grammatical correctness and emphasize the purpose of the assignment. The Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education framework is useful for improving assignment layout.\u202f <\/p>\n Further, we can invite students to write for real-world audiences and wrestle with what John C. Bean calls \u201cbeautiful problems.\u201d As Bean and Dan Melzer\u2019s Engaging Ideas: The Professor\u2019s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom<\/em> (Wiley, 2021) emphasizes, problems are naturally motivating. From my 25 years of experience teaching writing, students are motivated to write when they: <\/p>\n Much of this is confirmed by a three-year study conducted at three institutions that asked seniors to describe a meaningful writing project. If assignments are inviting and meaningful, students are more likely to do the hard work of learning and writing. In short, we can decrease friction preventing engagement with our assignments by making them sound inviting, by using language and layouts that take our audience into consideration, and by designing assignments that are not just assessments but opportunities to explore or communicate.\u202f <\/p>\n How then do we create friction when it comes to using generative AI? As a writing instructor, I truly believe in the power of writing to figure out what I think and to push myself toward new insights. Of course, this is not a new idea. Toni Morrison explains, \u201cWriting is really a way of thinking\u2014not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet.\u201d If we can get students to truly believe this by assigning regular low-stakes writing and reinforcing this practice, we can help students see the limits of outsourcing their thinking to generative AI.\u202f <\/p>\n As generative AI emerged, I realized that even though my writing courses are designed to promote writing to think, I don\u2019t explicitly emphasize the value of writing as mode of discovery, so I have rewritten all my freewrite prompts so that I drive this point home: \u201cThis is low-stakes writing, so don\u2019t worry about sentence structure or grammar. Feel free to write in your native language, use bullet points, or speech to text. The purpose of this freewriting is to give you an opportunity to pause and reflect, make new connections, uncover a new layer of the issue, or learn something you didn\u2019t know about yourself.\u201d And one of my favorite comments to give on a good piece of writing is \u201cI enjoy seeing your mind at work on the page here.\u201d\u202f <\/p>\n Additionally, we can create friction by getting to know our students and their writing. We can get to know their writing by collecting ungraded, in-class writing at the beginning of the semester. We can get to know our students by canceling class to hold short one-on-one or small group conferences. If we have strong relationships with students, they are less likely to cheat intentionally. We can build these bonds by sharing a video about ourselves, writing introductory letters, sharing our relevant experiences and failures, writing conversational feedback on student writing, and using alternative grading approaches that enable us to prioritize process above product.\u202f <\/p>\n There are no \u201cAI-proof\u201d assignments, but we can also create friction by assigning writing projects that don\u2019t enable students to rely solely on generative AI, such as zines, class discussions about an article or book chapter, or presentations: Generative AI can design the slides and write the script, but it can\u2019t present the material in class. Require students to include interactive components to their presentations so that they engage with their audiences. For example, a group of my first-year students gave a presentation on a selection from Jonathan Haidt\u2019s The Anxious Generation<\/em>, and they asked their peers to check their phones for their daily usage\u202f report and to respond to an anonymous survey.<\/p>\n Another group created a game, asking the class to guess which books from a display had been banned at one point or another. We can assign group projects and give students time to work on these projects in class; presumably, students will be less likely to misuse generative AI if they feel accountable in some way to their group. We can do a demonstration for students by putting our own prompts through generative AI and asking students to critique the outputs. This has the two-pronged benefit of demonstrating to students that we are savvy while helping them see the limitations of generative AI.\u202f <\/p>\n Showing students generative AI\u2019s limitations and the harm it causes will also help create friction. Generative AI\u2019s tendency to hallucinate makes it a poor tool for research; its confident tone paired with its inaccuracy has earned it the nickname \u201cbullshit machine.\u201d Worse still are the environmental costs, the exploitation of workers, the\u202fcopyright infringement, the privacy concerns, the explicit and implicit biases, the proliferation of mis\/disinformation, and more. Students should be given the opportunity to research these issues for themselves so that they can make informed decisions about how they will use generative AI. Recently, I dedicated one hour of class time for students to work in groups researching these issues and then present what they found to the class. The students were especially galled by the privacy violations, the environmental impact and the use of writers\u2019 and artists\u2019 work without permission or compensation.\u202f <\/p>\n When we focus on catching students who use generative AI or banning it, we miss an opportunity to teach students to think critically, we signal to students that we don\u2019t trust them and we diminish our own trustworthiness.\u202f If we do some friction fixing instead, we can support students as they work to become nimble communicators and critical users of new technologies. <\/p>\n Catherine\u202fSavini is the Writing Across the Curriculum coordinator, Reading and Writing Center coordinator, and a professor of English at Westfield State University. She enjoys designing and leading workshops for high school and university educators on writing pedagogy.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the writing across the curriculum and writing center coordinator on my campus, faculty ask me how to detect their students\u2019 use of generative AI and how to prevent it. My response to both questions is that we can\u2019t. In fact, it\u2019s becoming increasingly hard to not use generative AI. Back in 2023, according to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[163,2076,4344,4343,440],"class_list":{"0":"post-11098","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-ban","9":"tag-fix","10":"tag-friction","11":"tag-generative","12":"tag-opinion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11098"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11098\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/11099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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