There are those who worry that text-generation tools, such as ChatGPT, may come to usurp the role of the artist through its imitations of creative human labor. Others espouse harnessing the technology in new and helpful ways, using AI as a synergistic tool in their vast arsenal. The debate about artistic agency in the age of AI is playing out in earnest at Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, where a pair of English professors are designing curricula to explore some of those thorny questions, while giving students interested in creative writing a taste of an AI-driven future.
“The idea was to start thinking about what AI can do and what it can’t do,” said Juliana Spahr, a Northeastern University English professor who is teaching Writing Creatively in the Age of Artificial Intelligence this semester. “But there’s also a misunderstanding of what it can do because it’s such a great mimic.”
