AI Writing Fellows
The AI Writing Fellows program, offered by the Allan K. Smith Center for Writing and Rhetoric in partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning, supports Trinity College faculty in developing innovative course projects that thoughtfully integrate or respond to AI writing tools.
Projects may include (but are not limited to): creating new writing assignments that encourage or discourage the use of AI writing tools, revising and troubleshooting existing writing assignments to incorporate (or disincentivize) the use of AI, developing effective feedback tools for written work, developing lessons that accessibly narrate and contextualize the affordances and constraints of AI tools for discipline-specific writing tasks, etc.
AI Writing Fellows Cohorts
Chitra Jogani, Assistant Professor of Economics
Mushahid Hussain, Visiting Assistant Professor of Urban Studies
Belen Fernandez Milmanda, Associate Professor of Political Science
Evan Turiano, Visiting Assistant Professor of Public Policy & Law
Martha Risser, Associate Professor of Classical Studies
Nikisha Patel, Assistant Professor of Biology
Professor Patel’s project explored the possibilities and potential limitations of using LLM chatbots like ChatGPT to review and synthesize scientific literature, particularly in the context of her course BIOL-444: Global Change and Evolution. With the Writing Fellows, she explored the ways that students might AI tools to summarize and contextualize a scientific paper within the broader milieu of scientific research, and worked on methods to break down and critique the bots’ synthetically generated responses while foregrounding the importance of authentic scientific discourse practices.
Rosario Hubert, Associate Professor of Language & Culture Studies
Professor Hubert’s project addressed the potential conflicts that might arise when faculty attempt to stimulate students’ spirit of curiosity, given the “straight answers” that they are used to receiving from LLM chatbots. With the Writing Fellows, she developed coherent and transparent ways to narrate the purpose of creative assignments in her First-Year Seminar “Antarctica (or the Art of Science)” and developed activities that critiqued the simplistic and often cliche-laden prose of chatbot responses.
Alisha Holland, Lecturer and Coordinator of Introductory Psychology
Professor Holland focused on re-vamping the Critique Paper assignment for PSYC-101, a legacy assignment in the Psychology Department, which focuses on teaching students the content, empirical research methods, and applications of psychology. The Writing Fellows worked to help Professor Holland identify parts of the assignment that might be vulnerable to AI shortcuts and plagiarism, and re-work the assignment structure to help disincentivize the use of LLM chatbots.
Ari King, Postdoctoral Fellow in Urban Studies
Professor King developed a unit on AI and Ethnographic Writing for her Urban Ethnography course, focused on distinguishing between the kinds of “generalized” writing that LLM chatbots produce and the situated, subjective, and experience-rich processes of analysis of “textualization” that take place in the course of ethnographic field observation (and subsequent report-writing).
