DOLCE - April 19, 2024 - Generative AI and writing

Watch this recording from Friday, April 19th, 2024 of a noon Faculty Forum on Generative AI and Writing hosted by Academic Technology Services.

We were joined by four faculty members from the University Writing Program: Brendan Johnston, Marit MacArthur, Lisa Sperber, and Carl Whithaus; Erik Fausak, a veteran campus librarian and expert in the health sciences and veterinary medicine also offered his perspective on AI and conducting research.

MacArthur, Sperber, and Whithaus discussed a human-centered approach to generative AI in the context of AI feedback and peer review, while Johnston and Fausak discussed potential uses and drawbacks of using AI for finding relevant literature, testing clinical questions, and extracting data from sources.

• AI & Feedback Research slides: "A Human Centered Approach to AI: AI Feedback Combined with Peer Review," by Lisa Sperber, Marit MacArthur, Sophia Minnillo, Nick Stillman, and Carl Whithaus
• Students will no longer need to login to use ChatGPT - 4/2/2024 - “ChatGPT no longer requires an account to use it. Here's how OpenAI plans to handle the mass adoption.” [mashable.com] by Cecily Mauran. Includes instructions for the login-free version on how to disallow OpenAI from using your data to train the model.
• “Comparing the Quality of Human and ChatGPT Feedback on Students’ Writing” by Jacob Steiss, Tamara Tate, Steve Graham, Jazmin Cruz, Michael Hebert, Jiali Wang, Youngsun Moon, Waverly Tseng, and Mark Warschauer.
• Interesting substack that thinks about nested/scaffolded uses of GenAI in writing tasks — https://abramanders.substack.com/ 
• Microsoft Copilot (AI) for UC Davis affiliates: https://iet.ucdavis.edu/copilot-product-brief
• AI For Research: Uses and Misuses - slides: “Using AI for Research: Finding Literature, Testing Clinical Questions, and Data Extraction” by Erik Fausak and Brendan Johnston.
• You might appreciate the argument in this book about why we ascribe “intelligence” to AI tools, and why we should not. Here is a review of it: "How Robots Learned to Write So Well"
• Students can upload articles for extraction. This is what they say about “privacy” on papers that are uploaded for extraction https://support.elicit.com/en/articles/723521 
• Recently out: CEE’s UC Davis GenAI Student Survey - how Ss use and perceive GenAI at UCD: https://cee.ucdavis.edu/GenAISurvey
• From Lillian Jones: A grad group I am a part of and I recently hosted a live Consensus demo. We have a recording of it, if you are interested in checking it out. The co-founder, Eric Olson, talked candidly about a lot of the details behind the design and their future ideas. 
• Martin Hilbert gave a talk about GenAI / AI in the IET AI Speaker Series
• Good source for helping students navigate the difficulty of reading scholarly articles, non-STEM: “Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources” by Karen Rosenberg
• This is a great source on reading scientific articles which Lisa Sperber has been sharing for a while! “How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists” by Jennifer Raff
• From Marit MacArthur: I make that argument here: “AI, Expertise and the Convergence of Writing and Coding” and in a longer piece with more insight, I hope, that isn’t out yet.
• ChatGPT / AI Resources: https://bit.ly/chatgpt_resources
• Philosopher Richard Menary’s thoughts on writing as thinking and  transformative influence of writing on cognitive abilities: "Writing as thinking"
• "Acknowledging the use of generative artificial intelligence" from Monash
• Conference on College Composition and Communication (4 C's): 2024 4 C’s Conference
• Michael Ladisch - UC Davis expert on copyright
• The section of Margaret Merrill’s ChatGPT list with 4 articles about citing GenAI
  
• “Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning” by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson
• Summary of what MLA advises for citation: “MLA Citations for Content Generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools”
• On Draftback: “This Chrome Extension Helps Students Prove AI Didn't Write Their Essays” by Daniel Trock 
• Here are two working papers from MLA-CCCC 
• Librarian Matt Conner mentioned AI is being used to summarize content for our Redwood Scholars