Guidelines for students
YOUR RESPONSIBILITY
To create content that reflects student-generated knowledge: intellectual content that is uniquely your own.
What counts as learning is time-intensive work to which you as a student commit.
Reading: You are responsible for reading the entire assignment. You should be able to trace the entire arc of the reading + identify a single motif or detail that jumps out at you as especially important or noteworthy.
Writing is a key component to that work in the Humanities: building a complex argument that consists of the single, salient detail and worked into a larger argument or idea about the material, and about topics and ideas reflected in the material.
AI POLICY + STRONG RECOMMENDATIONS
Students must not use AI to GENERATE CONTENT. This is clearly plagiarism. You did not create the content.
Students should not use AI to BRAINSTORM papers. The content generated is not yours. You did not do the brainstorming.
Students should not use AI to OUTLINE papers. The outline is not yours. You did not create the outline.
Students should not use AI to EDIT WRITING. The editing is not yours. You did not edit.
See warning below.
DIRECTIONS: HOW TO USE OF AI
Use AI like you would an active Wikipedia page or internet source for quick access to basic information.
Use AI like you would an active and responsive android-cyborg assistant. Your AI assistant should help you do the work, not outline or create the work for you.
AI can point you to information.
Ask AI questions for very basic information when you might otherwise go to a static internet page
Use AI to generate bibliographical information regarding a particular topic.
Do not trust AI even with basic information.
Verify that said information offered by AI is factual, accurate, and precise.
THE PROBLEM WITH AI
You will not see for yourself important, granular, and uniquely singular detail that has drawn your own attention if you use AI to read and write for you. You are relying on data.
AI is not a person and you are not a machine.
AI is not real. Machine-generated knowledge is only a simulation of perfection.
Imperfections are an essential part of intellectual work.
Outlining and editing a paper paragraph by paragraph are major parts of intellectual work. By getting AI to do this work for them, students offshore a critical component of their education and intellectual development, and professional potential to a machine-based system or thing.
The information from AI in a Humanities class comes across to your reader as flat and unnuanced. Even a refined prompt will not say much of anything beyond the surface of a text or image.
AI is not able to put ideas or parts of a text or different texts to come up with a new idea or argument.
When you use AI, you are unable to VERIFY content. It might only “seem” right to you, but you have no means to assess that on your own. Only you can verify the content.
AI does not convey your own individual insight or voice
AI is not reliably able to cite texts and provide accurate page numbers. AI often hallucinates or, if you ask AI for a direct quote, it is likely it will offer you a paraphrase, at best a decontextualized quotation.
WARNING
To repeat: you are not a machine, and AI is not a person.
Do not rely on a machine.
Your instructors can detect the difference most of the time or often enough.
Instructors do not have the time or inclination to actively police student papers for AI.
Student use of AI to CREATE CONTENT will count as plagiarism for this course and receive a failing grade when detected with 100% certainty.
Student use of AI to GENERATE CONTENT will yield flat and shallow analysis that will be graded as such if not detected with 100% certainty by your instructors.
Instructors reserve the right to meet with students to assess the human or machine character and quality of written work.
Keep in mind: Your instructors use objective metrics, but there is a subjective element in how your instructors evaluate and grade your work. Lifeless work that bores your instructor is likely to be identified as such.
MOST IMPORTANT
Technology is inherently exciting. Your job is to figure out how to use and humanize it.
You are responsible for your own work and intellectual growth.
I am not here to police you.
My job is to introduce you to material, respond to and otherwise guide and support your questions, help you refine your thinking and writing, and then assess-evaluate your finished work.
There are no genuine shortcuts to intellectual labor.
Time is of the essence. Ideas and insight take time to gestate and refine.
Drafts and correcting drafts (writing and re-writing) are essential.
AI is not a replacement for face-to-face meeting with your instructors before or after class or during office hours in order to answer even the most basic questions about a text or assignment, tease out impressions, turn those impressions into an idea, and outline your paper.
If you need time to finish an assignment, please consult with your instructors
We are here to help you.
FOR FURTHER READING
The best writing about Chat GPT is at Wired Magazine.
I am recommending this piece here and that one here
