Distinguished Faculty Lecture

Spring 2025
Distinguished Faculty Lecture

Collaborative Intelligence: Writing with AI

presented by
Ethna Lay, PhD
Chair and Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric
School of Humanities, Fine and Performing Arts, Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

---

Wednesday, March 26, 2025
1-2:15 p.m.
Guthart Cultural Center Theater, First Floor, Axinn Library

In the string of technologies that have followed, not one is more powerful than the technology of writing. AI is arguably more revolutionary than any other, except perhaps for the printing press which automated the production of writing and increased literacy dramatically. Most certainly, medieval scribes writing manuscripts took issue with the impersonal, mechanical production and reproduction of texts by the printing press. This sentiment may correlate with the anxiety of more recent writers moving from drafting long hand to drafting on a screen, and to this current anxiousness, when machine-writing is utterly automated. One keen difference is that medieval scribes did not have the same relationship to textual authenticity and authorship that contemporary educators and students do. Currently, the question of what writing is, of what writing might be, in the context of AI is incredibly difficult to determine. Be assured: it will be writing that is generated from exemplars, just as it always has.  This technological, literacy moment has been in the making for quite some time, and it needs to be understood by students and faculty alike.

Since the discipline of writing and composition emerged in the 1980s, writing instructors have periodically been obsessed with policing plagiarism. At the same time, in direct contradiction, writing instructors offered templates for prescribed genres, for formulaic rhetoric, and for standardized conventions designed to pull debutante writers through their exercises until those writers are comfortable with form, style, and organization.  The same practice of working with exemplars is also a reality post-university for professional writers – technical, legal, and business – who have always worked with precedents. These practices seem to have anticipated the predictive nature of AI, even as instructors lament its arrival. This is the challenge for faculty: in courses that rely heavily on writing as the primary means of assessment, how can one guarantee evidence of authentic learning? Indeed, faculty must think differently about the nature of writing and its assessment.

Writing to learn is a well-established idea. By writing, one learns exactly what one thinks. It is the technology of writing that solidifies our intellect into exchangeable and portable format. Writing, as Walter Ong describes, restructures consciousness. Writing with AI is the next facet of this restructuring. If we let AI do the learning for our students, we are short-changing them. On the other hand, if we decide to ignore the potential of AI, we similarly short-change them. Somehow, we must teach them to interact profitably, to collaborate intelligently, with AI, so that their learning continues apace with the rapidly changing technological landscape. There is clearly nothing artificial in that.

Ethna Dempsey Lay is Chair and Associate Professor of Writing Studies and Rhetoric. Selected publications include articles in Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai – Philologia, Scholarly Research and Communication, College Composition and Communication, Basic Writing e-Journal, and Narrateur. She is co-editor of a collection of essays on stewardship in writing studies, titled Who Speaks for Writing: Stewardship in Writing Studies in the Twenty-First Century.

Blogging with her students since 2009, Lay studies the changing nature of literacy in these digital times. Her current book project, tentatively titled The Sequels of Literacy: Other Ways of Making Arguments, is an investigation of the way contemporary student writers make meaning in print and digital ways. Her research in writing and AI neatly complements this work.