Composing with AI

Conclusion

We conducted this study because we were curious about ChatGPT as a writing technology, and we wanted to learn more about how undergraduate students were understanding ChatGPT in the context of academic writing. Ultimately, we conducted a usability study that explored uses of ChatGPT by undergraduate students, based on hypothetical academic writing tasks. While our results cannot be generalized in any way, we would observe that students in our study noted both strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT, as well as questions about its usage. Overall, these results align well with scholarly discussions of ChatGPT, in which writing scholars have also outlined strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT technologies as well as key questions. However, in examining student responses further, we note that questions, concerns, and reactions to ChatGPT signaled that students were practicing critical thinking in their uses of ChatGPT. Their questions reminded us that writing is a rhetorical activity, even when communicated through surface-level prompts, and that considerations of style, content, organization, information literacy, and circumstance still matter. Further, student comments in this exploratory study underscore the need for guidance and clarity around ethical issues such as authorship and plagiarism. As noted earlier, in the course of working on this project we have often heard questions such as “is writing over?” and “do we need to teach writing anymore?” To these questions, we wholeheartedly respond that ChatGPT only increases the importance of writing pedagogies, and we encourage continued attention to AI technologies through a critical perspective.