“AI has the potential for limitless, creative mashups,” writes Grace Lapointe in Book Riot. “By focusing on public domain works, writers may be able to use AI in both fun and ethical ways.” In this workshop, we’ll engage the creative non-fiction writing process alongside ChatGPT, experimenting with how to use, borrow, and challenge the AI alongside our own work. We’ll emphasize the creative in creative nonfiction: Students will workshop drafts of low-stakes writing that that engages the bot as a tool or catalyst. Students are encouraged to write in a variety of genres, including nonfiction, poetry, translation, and auto- or docu-fiction—and to think of the technology as a vehicle for expanding genre boundaries. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces that emerge from our experiments.
Why chatbots in a creative writing workshop? Because communication technologies influence the evolution of writing in profound ways. Clay tablets enabled archives and record-keeping; the movable type printing press made wide circulation of books possible; the typewriter led to both standardized texts and poems that experimented with space on the page; copy machines and desktop publishing were catalysts for the flourishing of chapbooks and zines; blogging platforms enabled writers to find audiences outside traditional publishing venues (even while they helped diminish the market for paid freelancing writing). Each of these technologies changed relationships between authors and audience; genre and form; text and dissemination. They changed cultural conceptions of writing—and the lives of writers. Sophisticated chatbots are too new for any of us to predict the changes they may lead to in the worlds of literary publishing, writing in educational contexts, or genre and form. With 100 million users, Chat GPT is widely understood as a paradigm shift in the making, affecting all facets of culture, including the arts. What is less discussed is the fact that the humans who create, train, distribute, and use bots give them their power and meaning.
We’ll dig into this new technology as writers and humans participating in—and even shaping—the paradigm shift while it’s young and unpredictable. We’ll experiment with chatbots with a sense of play and interrogate their implications with a critical eye. We’ll explore the fun, the novel, the curious, the creepy, and the dangerous. Students will workshop short writing assignments that engage the bot—using it for research; translating its generated text into other forms; annotating it; subverting it; collaborating with it; exploring the possibilities of computational poetics; and creating intertextual mashups.
To contextualize our writing experiments, we’ll read the work of literacy scholars, journalists, artists and engineers, inquiring about the creative potential of chatbots as well as the ethical questions they raise as corporations compete to develop them, trainers build social bias into them, they spread information through dragging the web, Microsoft begins to integrate them into its writing software, and open-source developers seek to reclaim the democratic ethos behind the original development of the technology. As models for our own writing, we’ll read examples of writing influenced by technology (for example, early twentieth-century poetry and the typewriter; zines, chapbooks, and early personal computers; blogs and the emergence of what we used to call Internet 2.0; computational poetics and big data).
Note: We will be likely to use ChatGPT 4.0, released this spring, but with so many variations on the near horizon, we may expand depending on what emerges between now and the fall.
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