Kelvin Keown

UW Tacoma Writing Center Statement on AI-Generated Text

It’s a Brave New World.

We, the UWT Writing Center staff, acknowledge that rapidly developing artificial intelligence tools are changing the ways that all of us interact with text. For academic writers and those who teach and assess them, these changes present both challenges and opportunities.

We affirm that the purpose of the writing center is to help students develop as writers, not to police their writing. Because writing centers occupy a privileged yet fragile space in the academy that depends on student trust, the UWT writing center will not report student use of AI text generators to faculty or disciplinary bodies. However, we further affirm that AI cannot replace the intellectual labor of articulating learning in textual forms (AWAC, 2023), and we will endeavor to foster that understanding in students.

Therefore, Writing Center staff will continue to teach UWT students how to improve their academic writing and meet the requirements of their writing assignments to the best of their abilities, improving these through our work. To this end, we will approach student use of AI tools in writing as learning opportunities to evaluate the success of a text in its rhetorical situation. In other words: 

• does the text meet an instructor’s stated expectations?

• what can the writer learn about writing from an AI-generated text, including its shortcomings?

• how can the writer be more effective than an AI tool?

Much as the COVID-19 pandemic prompted us to offer tutoring through synchronous, remote video (e.g. Zoom), AI-generated text is the next change in a dynamic world that challenges us to adapt our teaching approaches without jettisoning our pedagogical principles. In this spirit, we pledge to continue our vital work in our campus community.