ChatGPT Genre Mashup
Submitter: Andy Famiglietti, West Chester U
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The experiment:
During the fall of 2023, I assigned an AI powered Genre Mashup assignment as part of my 100 level First-Year Writing class. The assignment strove to use the ability of ChatGPT to quickly emulate various textual genres as a way to help students notice the composition choices authors made when writing for one genre or another.
The assignment presented students with two lists, one of topics and the other of genres. Topics included: “An announcement warning of dangerous weather in the area”, “a description of the forces that lead up to the War of 1812”, “A report about a recent town council meeting”, and “A request for a one week extension on a recent assignment.” Genres included: “Sonnet”, “History Textbook”, “Newspaper Article”, and “Public Service Announcement.” Students were instructed to first choose a topic and a matching genre from the list (for example “an announcement of dangerous weather in the area in the style of a public service announcement”) and ask ChatGPT to generate this text. Then they were asked to keep the topic the same but choose a genre that did not match (for example “an announcement of dangerous weather in the area in the style of a sonnet”) and ask ChatGPT to generate this text. Finally, the assignment asked students to look over the texts generated and compose a 200-400 word reflection responding to some prompts designed to get students thinking about the concrete techniques ChatGPT used to achieve the two requested genres.
Results:
Overall, I think this assignment lead students to do some useful thinking about genre and writing. Many students noted some important word choices and structural elements that helped to establish genres. For example, they noticed the unique word choices that marked text as “high fantasy” and that emails to professors were more likely to include bulleted lists.
Students also seemed to enjoy the absurdity of creating “an email asking for an extension on an assignment in the style of cyberpunk” or “a town council meeting report in the style of high fantasy.”
The class this assignment was deployed in was fully online and asynchronous, and I probably needed to build in more follow up discussion in some form to tease out the finer points of genre and form. Many students were continuing to conflate genre and topic after the assignment, and that could have been further discussed and clarified.
Relevant resources:
Contact:
- Email: afamiglietti[AT]wcupa[DOT]edu
- Bluesky: @afamiglietti.bsky.social
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