Revising Writing Assignments to Discourage Generative AI Abuse Arts and Humanities

Please join us for a lecture by Professor Elizabeth Losh (College of William and Mary). It will be followed by an open discussion.

Revising Writing Assignments to Discourage Generative AI Abuse

Abstract: Drawing on the three working papers from the MLA-CCCC Task Force on Writing and AI, audience members will learn to identify approaches to discouraging AI use that interferes with student learning. This presentation will address the pros and cons of each approach from perspectives of accuracy, fairness and bias, instructor labor, student privacy, teacher-student relationships, and pedagogy. Topics will include ungrading, alternative assessment, intrinsic motivation approaches, revising learning objectives, multimodal assignments, AI-assisted writing, proctored writing, process tracking, and AI detection.

Bio: Elizabeth Losh is the Duane A. and Virginia S. Dittman Professor of American Studies and English with a specialization in New Media Ecologies at William & Mary, where she also directs the Equality Lab. Previously she directed the Culture, Art, and Technology Program at the University of California, San Diego. She is the is the author of Virtualpolitik: An Electronic History of Government Media-Making in a Time of War, Scandal, Disaster, Miscommunication, and Mistakes (MIT Press, 2009), The War on Learning: Gaining Ground in the Digital University (MIT Press, 2014), Hashtag (Bloomsbury, 2019), and Selfie Democracy: The New Digital Politics of Disruption and Insurrection (MIT Press, 2022). She is the co-author with Jonathan Alexander of Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2013; second edition, 2017; third edition, 2020). She also edited the collection MOOCs and Their Afterlives: Experiments in Scale and Access in Higher Education (University of Chicago, 2017) and co-edited Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and Digital Humanities (Minnesota, 2018) with Jacqueline Wernimont. She co-chaired the Modern Language Association – Conference on College Composition and Communication Joint Task Force on Writing and AI and is currently co-chairing the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching. Her forthcoming Guide to Gen AI will be out from Macmillan later this year.