Artificial Intelligence: Transy's AI Workshop

This workshop will engage faculty in the exploration of the use of AI text and media-generation technologies in teaching and learning. The facilitators will begin with a presentation that will overview some of the issues with AI generation systems, demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, share some current research about AI writing, including work the facilitators have done on human-AI collaboration; and talk about the implications of these systems for academic integrity policy.

The workshop will then provide an opportunity for participants to test out some of these systems using their own assignment prompts and will engage participants in discussion of some key questions, such as: What ethical and pedagogical concerns arise with the use of AI by students? What is an acceptable level of AI assistance (and does the answer depend on the course and/or disciplinary context)? Should we try to “AI-proof” writing and other media composition assignments? How should we revise/update our policies on academic integrity to account for these systems? And, finally, how might AI help us and our students in meeting learning outcomes? 

The link below provides information about the AI workshop, including resources for the workshop.

The workshop will take place on April 7 from 2:30-4:30, location TBD.

The workshop is open to anyone on campus with a teaching or tutoring role. We welcome faculty, academic staff, and students to learn more about this topic.

Professors Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter teach professional writing/communication courses in the Departments of English and Emerging Technology in Business & Design at Miami University.

Their current collaborative research focuses on human-machine teaming and the rhetoric and ethics of AI-based writing systems, an inquiry that  began with their co-authored 2017 book, Professional Communication and Network Interaction: A Rhetorical and Ethical Approach (Routledge).

In their most recent publication—"Team Roles and Rhetorical Intelligence in Human-Machine Writing" (2022)—McKee and Porter consider how humans might work with AI writing systems to help them become more "rhetorically intelligent" writing assistants.

Dr. Heidi A. McKee                                                        Dr. James Porter

McKee, Heidi A. and James E. Porter. "Ethics for AI Writing: The Importance of Rhetorical Context."

Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, & Society, New York, NY, 7-8 February, 2020.

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. 2020, pp. 110-118.

"Implicit in any rhetorical interaction—between humans or between humans and machines—are ethical codes that shape the rhetorical context, the social situation in which communication happens and also the engine that drives communicative interaction. Such implicit codes are usually invisible to AI writing systems because the social factors shaping communication (the why and how of language, not the what) are not usually explicitly evident in databases the systems use to produce discourse. Can AI writing systems learn to learn rhetorical context, particularly the implicit codes for communication ethics? We see evidence that some systems do address issues of rhetorical context, at least in rudimentary ways. But we critique the information transfer communication model supporting many AI writing systems, arguing for a social context model that accounts for rhetorical context—what is, in a sense, “not there” in the data corpus but that is critical for the production of meaningful, significant, and ethical communication. We offer two ethical principles to guide design of guide design of AI writing systems: transparency about machine presence and critical data awareness, a methodological reflexivity about rhetorical context and omissions in the data that need to be provided by a human agent or accounted for in machine learning."

McKee, Heidi A. and James E. Porter. "Team Roles & Rhetorical Intelligence in Human-Machine

Writing." IEEE International Professional Communication Conference, Limerick, Ireland, 18-20

July 2022. Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, 2022. pp. 384-391.

"This paper examines AI-based writing systems and how humans might partner with these systems to produce effective professional communication. We offer a taxonomy for examining roles in human-machine teaming for writing: Resource Tool, Assistant, Writer, and Executive Decision-Maker (whether at the beginning or end of the project). In particular, we focus on human-machine teaming in relation to what we call rhetorical intelligence, the ability to invent and write for audience, purpose, and context. We examine human-machine writing by focusing on two cases: GameChanger and Phrazor by vPhrase. We conclude by proposing some guidelines for human-machine teaming for the production of professional communication."

Workshop Bibliography

Includes articles about artificial intelligence, writing, and ChatGPT.