Advanced Expository Writing: Writing and Artificial Intelligence

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) becomes ubiquitous in our search engines, email, social media, and word processing systems, it is important to understand how the output of large language models (LLMs) differ from that of human communicators, as well as understanding the harms they might produce. This course explores AI through the disciplines of rhetoric and ethics, analyzing definitions, testing claims and evidence, considering social and ethical effects, and developing policy arguments. Students study issues of copyright and intellectual property, bias and fairness, security, sustainability, and transparency in AI systems, and apply them to case studies. Students also work on teams to perform an ethical analysis of an AI system for a specific use case, and they learn to analyze the output of generative AI systems in terms of rhetorical situation, genre, discourse, audience awareness, and information design. Readings are drawn from leaders in the field of AI, scholars in the ethics of technology, and rhetoricians.