Below is an excerpt from an article, “Northeastern professors, students explore creative writing in the age of AI,” from Northeastern Global News.
“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.”
The class is ground zero for the exploration of generative AI’s capabilities and limitations, a laboratory intended to get students to exercise both their creative and critical faculties by examining the role of chatbots and prompt engineering in the creation of literary art.
As part of that effort, Saphr looks to explore not just the “computational” aspects of AI, or its ability to recognize patterns and produce variations on patterns, or its ability to act as a proofreader, but also its “expressive” aspects, to the extent that they exist.”
You can read the full article in Northeastern Global News here: “Northeastern professors, students explore creative writing in the age of AI.”
