A letter to Faculty and Staff from Director Chris Schacht

The Writing Center will operate by three central tenets in regard to AI 

1. Writing Center tutors will follow a professor’s AI guidelines for a course 

As with all assignments, tutors will follow faculty guidelines for written work, therefore our tutors will check for the following items in the syllabus: 

2. When AI use is encouraged or required, the Writing Center will teach students how to use Gen-AI in ways that support learning 

A central part of tutoring is asking questions – from “what do you want to work on today” to “how does this topic fit into your thesis?” and everything in between. In this same vein, we will help students with what kinds of questions to ask the Gen AI, and with assessing the AI outputs, all with a focus on learning and critical thinking, not with the purpose of getting a convenient output. Accordingly, when we use prompts, they will be limited to what the professor has allowed, which usually includes background research into a topic, questions of formatting, and sentence-level revision.  

We will not be asking Gen-AI to produce text that then goes into the writer’s work, unless explicitly required to do so by the professor.  

3. The Writing Center will continue to promote a Students’ Right to Their Own Language by questioning the biases and language generated through AI 

By now, I hope it’s well known that Gen-AI models are built on heavily biased, if not outright racist and sexist, training data. Most companies try to mitigate this problem by training the program to not generate blatantly offensive outputs. Results vary.  

Even when a Gen-AI manages to not reproduce the biases present in its training data, the result is often dull, anodyne prose that does not represent a student’s voice. At best, you end up with efficient but uninteresting writing that homogenizes language. At worst, it colonizes writing by setting a standard of “good” writing that strips a writer of the voice that is the gift and strength of their cultural background. Writing Center tutors are trained to acknowledge, affirm, and encourage a writer’s identity. We will continue to do so by pushing back when AI recommends changes that undermine a writer's voice, and to inform writers of the programming biases inherent in Gen-AI.