It has been just over a year since ChatGPT, the game-changing generative A.I. [artificial intelligence] tool – stormed onto the scene of the internet and into the lives of nearly everyone who interfaces with the internet in their life and work. From its release on November 30th 2022, it has overwhelmed and forced changes to work patterns and methods across fields and disciplines, and has brought to the fore particularly fraught questions about the tool – a large language-based model chatbot – and its use in the classroom for educators.
Significantly and fascinatingly, the edicts of OER [open educational resources] and OA [open access] are in mission and terms deeply related to the concept – and, indeed, the kinds of resources created and shared – openly – are those which have been used to train and create this mighty tool. OpenAI describes itself as, “Creating safe AGI [artificial general intelligence] that benefits all of humanity.” Unesco describes OER as: “Open Educational Resources (OER) are learning, teaching and research materials in any format and medium that reside in the public domain or are under copyright that have been released under an open license, that permit no-cost access, re-use, re-purpose, adaptation and redistribution by others.” The philosophies of both of these share a commitment to openly and freely sharing resources – without withholding access to information and technology from the world through paywalls and seeking to escape the confines of publishing and technological access historically as well as contemporaneously.
But how can we square the situations that many notable published authors have found themselves in, when learning that their works have been used to train and develop this software – that some see as eliminating the need for attention to writing itself? Thousands of authors’ pirated books have been used to train the tool – from which there is no going back. How can we square the rights of published – and, in particular, living – authors with the reality that accessible texts – be they legally or illegally findable and usable on the world wide web – are used to train tools that completely change how we must think about writing in the contemporary world?
Prompted by the urgency of generative AI both within and outside of our classrooms, we WAC fellows at City Tech, will examine the tool and how we might use it in the classroom in a series of blog posts. We aim to provide a realistic and thoughtful engagement with the tool and to take into account how significant this is for those of us weeking to incorporate the methods of WAC [Writing Across the Curriculum] into our classrooms for the benefit of our students and to improve and bolster their learning outcomes through the incorporation of writing in diverse and disparate fields and disciplines.
This forthcoming series will reflect upon the continuing relevance of WAC principles in the age of AI, and will provide some practical examples of how to incorporate the principles into our teaching methods, ranging from how to encourage active learning through writing and fostering writing as a process in the age of AI.
