Annette Vee 4/24

Text Generation Technologies and the Future of Writing

Monday April 24, 2023, 5:00pm

Neilson Browsing Room

Reception follows

New writing technologies are shaping public discourse: networked writing on Twitter; writing merged with images on Instagram; autosuggestions on Google searches; algorithms that curate what we see on TikTok; bots that fill up the comment sections on news stories. There's so much writing circulating through our feeds and inboxes that we skim more than ever and use auto-generated replies to keep up. We read and write differently now than in the age of letters and print. So, how should colleges teach writing in the 21st century? This talk provides an accessible overview of some of the technologies shaping public writing, points to a few best practices in writing pedagogy, and presents some ethical quandaries for faculty to consider. In particular, we'll look closely at ways that AI-driven text-generation tools such as GPT-3 are automating writing in fields such as journalism, law, and medicine and consider the implications for teaching writing across the curriculum. These technologies have historical precedent in earlier eras when androids, typewriters, and even spirits circumvented the human challenge of composing. How radical our current, computational technologies are, how drastically we should shift our pedagogies, and how terrified we should be about the teaching or production of writing now are all open questions! But we'll consider them together in this session.

 

Annette Vee is an Associate Professor of English and Director of Composition at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is the author of Coding Literacy:  How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing (MIT Press, 2017).