Write Your Own AI Policy

Submitter: Brandee Easter, York U

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The experiment:

This in-class activity was part of a first-year writing course in the Spring of 2023. In this activity, students looked at the university’s policy on academic honesty and discussed how AI may or may not fit into the pre-existing guidelines. Based on our previous experiments with text generation tools, students then worked in small groups to write a suggested update to the academic honesty policy.

When I introduced the topic of AI to this class, I was surprised to hear gasps from students. Perhaps because many were writing majors, students were reluctant to consider AI as anything other than plagiarism or cheating. The goal of this activity was to complicate that equation by looking directly at plagiarism policies and to ask what expressive, persuasive, and creative possibilities might be limited by that definition, including AI students already use frequently but don’t think of as AI (such as grammar checkers).

Results:

This moment was ideal for this conversation because our university had yet to develop its own stance on text generation technologies. This meant that students were largely on their own to determine how they interacted with these tools, and I hoped this activity would help them think about possibilities and problems across various writing contexts.

If I teach this again, I would draw on a range of policies to compare approaches that provide a variety stances toward AI to help students imagine more complex relationships with these technologies. I would also spend more time on activities and readings beforehand that help students see the creative potential of AI to challenge an immediate conflation of AI with plagiarism.

Contact:

• Email: bdeaster[AT]yorku[DOT]ca
• Website: https://brandeeeaster.com/