This assignment introduces students to some of the pitfalls of uncritical use of AI in performing academic tasks (here, reading/comprehending texts). It is designed to lead into a discussion in which students identify some of the differences in outcomes between machine- and human/expert-generated knowledge.
(in class, prior to assignment) talk about, play with some freely-available/popular/interesting GI tools
homework: How can these tools help with the task of reading/understanding/learning the ideas of the book [select a text].
NB. Text selection might be course-specific (i.e., related to the larger themes of the course) or germane to the topic of AI itself.
NB. For tools that require the uploading of texts, be mindful of fair use practices.
Require that students clearly label and submit all chat session histories (i.e., prompts and responses) for all AI models and related materials that they use, and that they generate all written work for the steps below without using any AI tools. Require that they submit these materials ahead of time (in PDF form) for easy reference during class.
Outline the following steps:
Please briefly review the NotebookLM materials provided as well as any other AI tools that you think might be useful (e.g. other Gen AI tools, follow up conversations in them, etc).
Please determine and articulate a strategy for how you’d like to use some / all / none of these tools to deeply understand the book.
Please execute your strategy and describe how well it worked for you. What level of knowledge did you achieve? How deeply do you understand the points in the book? Do you think you could discuss these ideas fluently in class? Rate your level of knowledge on a 1-10 scale (1 = no knowledge, 10 = expert knowledge).
Please read the book and describe what additional value you gained from reading it. Again answer the questions and ratings described in Step 3.
What are the main points of the book, and which of these resonate most with you? Are the arguments credible? Why / Why not? Do they still apply today?
discussion (next class)
How did you explore the points of the book?
How deeply did you understand its argument?
How did this change/differ before/after use of AI?
2. This assignment leads students to reflect on AI's impact on their own behaviors, and that of society more generally. It centers on the recent book by Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation.
Introduce the assignment: we've lately discussed various AI tools and their effects. Now, we're going to reflect on your personal view of how AI is impacting society as a whole, and your own thoughts, values, and behaviors. We'll do this while starting to read Haidt's book (which is about the impact of technology--social medial-- on different generations.
To do this, we ask that answer the following questions for yourself:
AI and Social Values [students can begin this work in class and/or do it as part of homework]
What three areas of human society do we think will be most impacted by AI over the next 5 years? Please be sure to include specific examples to clarify / justify / explain your thoughts.
In those areas, what do you personally value (i.e. what do you believe are important factors / behaviors / metrics for optimal outcomes and experiences)?
How do you see AI technologies affecting your values in these areas? Which AI technologies will be the most disruptive / transformative? Please be specific.
AI and Personal Values
What AI technologies do you use the most? How? How has it personally affected your external / social environment in the past 2 years?
How has AI changed your internal / personal values and behaviors in the past 2 years? Have these changes affected you in a positive or negative way? Why / why not?
Ask them to reflect on their previous readings in the course with these ideas in mind.
Ask them to read the start of (or all of) the Haidt book, and to be prepared to discuss it in class. What are the main ideas? How do they relate to their experience growing up with technology?
They should submit a document with written responses to these questions.
Discussion in the ensuing class begins with these responses.
This module asks students to think about and reflect upon social media in general, and on the effects that AI has *through* social media on society as a whole.
Students are going to perform their own research, and continue to read Haidt's book. (See module 2., above.)
Explain to the students that, for this assignment, if they use AI tools in any way, they are to clearly label and submit all chat session histories (i.e., prompts and responses) for all AI models and related materials that they use. They are also to generate all written work for the assignment *without* using any AI tools. They should submit their work as a PDF ahead of class.
The homework is to address the following, using the reading and their own research (i.e., web-based or AI-based). The ensuing discussion will be based on this work.
1. What are the most important Social Media platforms? How do we measure their
“importance” and social impact? Why are they important?
2. Which demographics / populations of society are most impacted by each of these
platforms? How do various demographics use it? What is the value of using them?
3. What are the impacts of AI in Social Media? What are the main benefits and drawbacks
of using AI to assist with posts, or to respond to others’ posts?
4. How significant of a problem are “fake” accounts in Social Media (i.e. accounts that are
not the primary identity of a single individual, or misrepresent themselves in some way)?
What are the main challenges and benefits with having fake accounts in the Social
Media ecosystem?
5. How important are automated recommendation systems in Social Media accounts?
What do they do? How do they work?
6. How important are influencers and followers in the Social Media ecosystem? What do
they do? How do they work?
7. What are the incentives for influencers? What are the incentives for followers?
Personal Impacts of AI in Social Media
8. How does social media impact your personal life? (E.g. Does it affect what you believe
is true? What you think is important? Whom you communicate with? What you think
about? How you perceive your relationships? How you spend your time?)
9. In your group of friends, are you aware of anyone who has been very positively or very
negatively impacted by social media? How?
Reading
10. Please read Parts 2 and 3 (Chapters 2-8) of the Haidt Book, being sure to read critically,
and check your understanding of the main points (on each page) to prepare for a class
discussion. Please choose two points you feel are important to mention – articulate why
and what pages these are on.
AI in the News
11. Please find a current AI article of interest to you and share it in our class #ai-news Slack
channel. Why is this interesting and what social aspect of AI does this address? Please
be prepared to discuss the article with the class and explain why you feel it’s important to
be aware of.
This module builds on #3, again asking students to at once do research in digging into topics raised by the reading, and to be reflective about that research.
In class previously and today we have discussed various AI tools that have affected society as a whole and each of us individually in the past few years. The assignment this week asks you to explore the variety of AI tools available to create various types of content used in Social Media posts, and how the widespread availability of these tools is changing our collective perspective on communication and social truth.
Please use the reading and do your own research to try to understand these questions, citing researched sources or personal accounts to help explain your perspective.
We will also finish reading the book “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt, which describes the impacts of Social Media on human society across different generations.
[questions for homework]
AI Tools for Social Media
1. Please choose three Social Media platforms that you believe have high social impact, and investigate the most important AI tools / services for content creators on that platform. What tools did you find? How do they work?
2. Please choose one platform and take a deeper dive into three AI tools that are used to create / automate content for this platform.
a. What is the value of using them? Who derives the most benefit from these tools? Who derives the least benefit from these tools?
b. Based on your understanding of the platform, what do you believe is the overall impact of these tools being widely used? How are different participants in the platform affected by this type of content creation? For each group, please assess if the impact is positive or negative and explain why.
AI Tools for Content Creation
3. What are your favorite AI tools / services to enhance your personal creativity? What do you use them for? Why / How are they helpful?
4. AI Image Tools
a. Please look around for AI tools / services that help with creating images. What tools did you find? How do they work?
b. Please choose at least three AI tools and an image you’d like to create. Then evaluate how well the tools did at creating the desired image on a custom scale based on what you value (from 1 to 10, where 1=worst and 10=best).
c. Please discuss what you liked / didn’t like about each tool.
5. AI Video Tools
a. Please look around for AI tools / services that help with creating videos. What tools did you find? How do they work?
b. Please choose at least three AI tools and a video you’d like to create. Then evaluate how well the tools did at creating the desired image on a custom scale based on what you value (from 1 to 10, where 1=worst and 10=best).
c. Please discuss what you liked / didn’t like about each tool.
6. AI Voice Creation Tools
a. Please look around for AI tools / services that help with creating custom voices. What tools did you find? How do they work?
b. Please choose at least three AI tools and a video you’d like to create. Then evaluate how well the tools did at creating the desired image on a custom scale based on what you value (from 1 to 10, where 1=worst and 10=best).
c. Please discuss what you liked / didn’t like about each tool.
7. AI Voice Recognition Tools
a. Please look around for AI tools / services that help with creating custom voices. What tools did you find? How do they work?
b. Please choose at least three AI tools and a video you’d like to create. Then evaluate how well the tools did at creating the desired image on a custom scale based on what you value (from 1 to 10, where 1=worst and 10=best).
Preliminary Final Project Question
8. Please choose a compelling question where AI and Human Society interact that you are interested in exploring for your final project. What question did you choose? Why do you find it interesting / compelling?
Reading
9. Please read Part 4 (Chapters 9-12) of the Haidt Book, being sure to read critically, and check your understanding of the main points (on each page) to prepare for a class discussion. Please choose two points you feel are important to mention – articulate why and what pages these are on.
AI in the News
10. Please find a current AI article of interest to you and share it in our class Slack channel. Why is this interesting and what social aspect of AI does this address? Please be prepared to discuss the article with the class and explain why you feel it’s important to be aware of.
In this module students dig into AI itself--what it is made of, its internal architecture, and the idea of "training" an AI model.
Please use the reference materials, readings, and do your own research to try to understand these questions, citing researched sources or personal accounts to help explain your perspective.
We will also start reading the book “Why Machines Learn” by Anil Ananthaswamy, which describes the mathematics and internal architecture of many AI models.
Scoring “Small” Large Language Models
1. Choose an area of society that you’d like to explore and make 5 questions to ask a language model to test its knowledge in your chosen area. Then choose your favorite 3 LLMs in Ollama (https://ollama.com) and try out how well they answer your questions. Please score these responses using our usual scoring scale (i.e. 1 = Unsatisfactory to 5 = Amazing).
2. Please make a leaderboard for your models, and compute the average score for each model. Any surprises or interesting observations about the answers? How does the size of the model affect the answer and running time?
3. Please look at how your chosen models perform on 2 related benchmarks (either on the Ollama model pages (https://ollama.com/search) or on the HuggingFace website (e.g. https://huggingface.co/open-llm-leaderboard)). Do these benchmark scores help to explain how well the model did on your questions? Please explain your thoughts.
Tokenization
4. Please tokenize your first question according to the three OpenAI ChatGPT tokenizers on their webpage (https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer). Did the number of tokens vary? Why have multiple tokenizers?
5. Please use the Claude Tokenizer (https://www.claudetokenizer.com/) to tokenize your first question, and also to tokenize one of the images you have previously generated.
How many tokens did these take? Is there a big difference?
6. In contrast to the way most of us use LLMs, if you want to build an application that uses a model hosted commercially, there is a cost per million tokens used. How expensive is it to use the ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini models when sending them tokens through an API (Application Programming Interface)? How much do you estimate it would cost to translate the two books we have read in class so far into another language (e.g. into French)?
7. (Extra Credit): Please reconstruct the text from the following list of GPT-4o token ids:
[5299, 2226, 448, 20837, 679, 2827, 540, 261, 7362,
3901, 3206, 2226, 95964, 13, 130530, 116, 13865, 227]
How did you do it?
Readings
8. Please lightly read each chapter of the Anthaswamy Book, being sure to summarize your understanding of the main points (in each chapter) to prepare for a class discussion. Please choose two points you feel are important to mention – articulate why and what pages these are on.
9. Please read this timely 10/1/2025 article in the Daily Princetonian about “The future of humanities teaching in the AI age, according to Princeton professors”. What do you think of the arguments there? What do you think Humanities teaching will be like in the age of AI? Is this a good or bad thing? Why?
AI in the News
10. Please find a current AI article of interest to you and share it in our class #ai-news Slack channel. Why is this interesting and what social aspect of AI does this address? Please be prepared to discuss the article with the class and explain why you feel it’s important to be aware of.
This was the midterm essay assignment for my HIST 1062 course - a required general education course. This approach was used because in testing different AI models in answering the essay questions I had drafted, the models did a pretty good job (B level work) and therefore I needed a different approach.
The idea with this assignment is to focus on the process of encountering, assessing, and analyzing historical material. I believe that, as AI models continue to improve and generate written content that is increasingly difficult for humans to distinguish from human-generated content, we, as teachers, need to focus on the process so that students can both create and also analyze written work.
Assess the strengths and weaknesses of AI-generated content
Engage with course materials that were not included in the AI-generated essay
Identify connections between understandings of the Declaration of Independence in the 18th Century to the Present Day
Reflect on their own use of AI tools
The course was focused on the Declaration of Independence we near the 250th anniversary commemoration of American Independence. Students had been introduced to the Declaration and to American's evolving understanding of this famous document.
For your Midterm exam, you will read and then critique one of the two AI generated essays below. (Full description of the assignment follows the two prompts and essays).
AI Essay #1:
I gave Microsoft CoPilot this prompt:
Read this piece on Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance. Based on your reading of this essay and other course materials, and your analysis of that performance, discuss how the Declaration of Independence has been part of the narrative around independence of one or more nations in the Americas (beyond the United States) and how the ideals of the Declaration are part of that national or hemispheric identity. Your answer should be in an essay of 1000-1500 words. The best answers will make use of our course readings and materials and your own understanding of the Declaration of Independence.
And then gave it the full text of the essay from here: https://www.hnn.us/article/the-bad-bunny-doctrine
This is the essay CoPilot produced:
Hemispheric Independence and the Declaration of Independence:
Bad Bunny, the “Bad Bunny Doctrine,” and the Meaning of America
Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl LX halftime performance, as Arturo Chang argues in “The Bad Bunny Doctrine,” was not simply an artistic statement but a political intervention into the meaning of “America” itself. By naming dozens of countries across the Western Hemisphere while holding a football emblazoned with the words “Together, we are America,” Bad Bunny challenged the assumption that “America” is synonymous with the United States or that political belonging must be confined within the borders of the modern nation‑state. Chang situates this moment within a long, often forgotten tradition of hemispheric American identity, one that predates and complicates the familiar story of national independence. When read alongside the Declaration of Independence and other course materials from the Age of Revolutions, Bad Bunny’s performance reveals how the Declaration’s ideals helped generate not only new nations, but also broader visions of American emancipation that transcended national boundaries.
The U.S. Declaration of Independence is typically understood as the founding document of a single nation. Yet, as Chang and historians such as David Armitage suggest, the Declaration functioned from the start as a hemispheric text. Its language of natural rights, popular sovereignty, and the legitimacy of resistance to arbitrary power articulated a framework that could be—and was—adapted by people across the Americas. In this sense, the Declaration was less a uniquely “American” document in the national sense than a catalyst for an American revolutionary imagination that stretched from North America to the Caribbean and South America.
The Declaration’s most famous claim—that all people possess “unalienable Rights” to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”—marked a decisive break from the logic of empire. Under European colonial rule, peoples in the Americas were governed according to hierarchies of race, status, and origin. Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, free people of color, mestizos, and even American‑born Creoles were all subject, in different ways, to imperial prerogative. The Declaration challenged this order by asserting that political authority derives not from kings or empires but from the consent of the governed. While the document failed to apply these principles universally within the United States itself, its conceptual rupture with empire proved transformative across the hemisphere.
Chang emphasizes that during the Age of Revolutions, people across the Americas often identified themselves as Americans rather than as members of future nation‑states. This hemispheric identity allowed disparate groups to recognize shared interests in resisting colonial domination. Bad Bunny’s performance visually resurrects this tradition. The procession of national flags at the end of the halftime show does not erase national differences, but it situates them within a broader community shaped by shared histories of colonization, extraction, migration, and resistance. In doing so, the performance echoes the Declaration’s original appeal to “the opinions of mankind,” positioning American emancipation as a moral and political project with global—and hemispheric—significance.
The Haitian Revolution provides one of the clearest examples of how the Declaration’s logic was reinterpreted beyond the United States. Haitian revolutionaries exposed the hypocrisy of European declarations of rights that excluded enslaved people, reframing liberty and equality through the lens of abolition. Jean‑Jacques Dessalines’s proclamation that he had “avenged America” underscores how freedom in Haiti was understood not merely as national independence but as a redemptive act for the hemisphere as a whole. Haiti’s revolution thus expanded the meaning of the Declaration’s ideals, insisting that natural rights were incompatible with slavery and racial hierarchy. This insistence profoundly influenced political movements throughout the Caribbean and Latin America.
Chang traces these connections through events such as the 1797 La Guaira conspiracy in present‑day Venezuela, where revolutionary actors distributed pamphlets titled “The Rights of Man and of Citizen… Directed to the Americans.” The language is telling. The intended audience was not a single nation but a hemispheric people united by shared subjection to colonial rule. That these materials were printed in Saint‑Domingue with the assistance of Haitian revolutionaries highlights the material reality of hemispheric solidarity, not merely rhetorical influence. The Declaration’s framework—rights, consent, and resistance—provided a common political language that allowed diverse actors to imagine themselves as participants in a shared American struggle.
This hemispheric logic also shaped constitutional experiments during the independence era. Chang’s discussion of Mexico’s 1814 constitution, which granted citizenship to all Americans “born or allied,” illustrates how independence was initially conceived as part of a continental emancipation project. Leaders like José María Morelos viewed independence not simply as separation from Spain but as participation in a broader American community opposed to empire. Similar dynamics appeared in the “United Provinces of South America,” whose very name echoed the “United States of America” and reflected the appeal of federal republicanism as a hemispheric model. These examples demonstrate that the nation‑state was not the inevitable endpoint of revolutionary politics but a contingent solution to the problem of empire.
Bad Bunny’s halftime show captures this contingency by juxtaposing national symbols with scenes of shared labor, culture, and diaspora. The sugarcane plantation that framed the performance evokes the economic foundations of colonial power throughout the Caribbean. Sugar was not simply a Puerto Rican crop; it was a hemispheric system tied to slavery, forced labor, and global markets. By centering this space, Bad Bunny underscores the material conditions that made empire possible and highlights the enduring legacies of those systems in the present. In doing so, the performance aligns with the Declaration’s insistence that political authority must be judged by its effects on human freedom and well‑being.
Puerto Rico’s status as an unincorporated U.S. territory further complicates the Declaration’s legacy. As Chang notes, Puerto Rico lacks voting representation and remains subject to decisions made by distant institutions—conditions that closely resemble colonial rule. Here, the Declaration functions less as a founding document than as a normative critique. Its claim that governments derive legitimacy from consent raises uncomfortable questions about the democratic status of territories governed without full political participation. Bad Bunny’s performance, particularly its references to electrical outages and economic marginalization, highlights how colonial relationships persist within modern political systems that claim to be post‑imperial.
At the same time, the halftime show emphasizes the diasporic dimensions of American identity. Images of bodegas, domino games, and street life link Caribbean homelands to cities like New York and San Francisco, spaces that have long served as centers of hemispheric political and cultural exchange. These diasporas reflect the continuation of hemispheric American identity beyond the independence era. From the nineteenth century onward, American cities have been sites where ideas of emancipation, citizenship, and belonging circulated across borders. Bad Bunny’s performance situates itself within this tradition, reminding viewers that “America” has always been shaped by movement, mixture, and shared struggle.
Chang’s analysis ultimately challenges the assumption that the nation‑state is the natural or final expression of revolutionary politics in the Americas. The rise of U.S. imperial power in the late nineteenth century, as José Martí warned in “Nuestra América,” narrowed the meaning of “America” and displaced earlier visions of hemispheric solidarity. Yet, as Bad Bunny’s performance demonstrates, those older traditions have not disappeared. They remain available as resources for rethinking political belonging in an era marked by inequality, migration, and the persistence of imperial structures.
In this light, the Declaration of Independence emerges as both a national and hemispheric text. Its ideals helped legitimize the creation of new nations, but they also fueled broader movements that imagined America as a shared space of emancipation rather than a collection of competing states. Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, as interpreted by Chang, revives this forgotten dimension of the American revolutionary tradition. By declaring “Together, we are America,” the performance invites audiences to reconsider independence not as a closed historical event, but as an ongoing, collective project—one that continues to challenge empire, exclusion, and the limits of the nation‑state.
AI Essay #2 (generated by KeanUAI our internal AI model that runs on CloudForce Nebula One - this is availabel to all students, staff, and administrators):
Hi KeanU - can you help me answer this essay question: Your answer should be in an essay of 1000-1500 words. The best answers will make use of our course readings and materials and your own understanding of the Declaration of Independence. What does it mean that the Declaration of Independence was written by and supported by men who were enslavers? How does the institution of slavery in the United States impact the language in the Declaration and the understanding of it in 1776 and immediately thereafter?
ONEchat
Absolutely—I can help. Below is a model essay (about 1,200 words) that directly answers the prompt, integrates historical context commonly used in U.S. history and political thought courses, and demonstrates close engagement with the Declaration of Independence. You should adapt wording or emphasis to reflect your specific course readings and lectures, but this provides a strong foundation.
Slavery, Contradiction, and the Meaning of the Declaration of Independence
The Declaration of Independence stands as one of the most influential political documents in world history, asserting that “all men are created equal” and endowed with natural rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet this language of universal liberty was authored and endorsed largely by men who enslaved others or benefited from a society structured around racial bondage. This apparent contradiction has shaped both the language of the Declaration and its interpretation from 1776 onward. Understanding what it means that enslavers wrote the Declaration requires confronting slavery not as a peripheral hypocrisy but as a central institution that influenced the document’s limits, meanings, and legacies.
The fact that many of the Declaration’s authors and supporters were enslavers reflects the political and economic realities of colonial America. Figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison articulated Enlightenment ideals of natural rights while simultaneously participating in or accommodating chattel slavery. This contradiction was not lost on contemporaries. Rather, it reveals that the Declaration was not a radical blueprint for immediate social equality but a political argument designed to justify independence from Britain while preserving colonial unity. Slavery shaped both what the Declaration claimed and what it left unsaid.
The language of the Declaration draws heavily on Enlightenment political philosophy, particularly the ideas of John Locke. Locke argued that legitimate governments are formed to protect natural rights and that people may overthrow governments that violate those rights. Jefferson’s phrasing closely mirrors this framework. However, the universal language of natural rights coexisted uneasily with the reality that enslaved people were legally defined as property rather than rights-bearing individuals. For enslavers, the phrase “all men” did not necessarily imply racial equality. In 1776, political language often assumed a restricted definition of “the people,” typically referring to white male property holders.
This limitation becomes clearer when examining Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration, which included a condemnation of the transatlantic slave trade. Jefferson accused King George III of imposing slavery on the colonies and violating the “sacred rights of life and liberty” of enslaved Africans. This passage was removed during debate in the Continental Congress, largely due to objections from southern colonies and northern merchants who profited from the slave trade. The removal demonstrates how deeply slavery constrained the revolutionary rhetoric of freedom. Unity against Britain required silence on slavery, even when its existence contradicted the document’s core principles.
The institution of slavery thus directly shaped the final language of the Declaration. The ideals of equality and liberty were framed broadly and abstractly, allowing enslavers to endorse them without challenging their own practices. The Declaration makes no explicit mention of slavery, race, or enslaved people, which allowed different audiences to interpret its claims in ways that aligned with their interests. For white colonists seeking independence, the Declaration articulated a collective grievance against tyranny. For enslaved people, however, the document’s language exposed a painful contradiction between proclaimed ideals and lived reality.
At the same time, the universal language of the Declaration created possibilities that extended beyond the intentions of its authors. Even if Jefferson and others did not envision racial equality, the claim that rights are natural and inalienable was difficult to contain. Enslaved people, free Black communities, women, and later abolitionists seized upon the Declaration’s words to argue that the nation had failed to live up to its own principles. In this sense, the Declaration functioned as both a product of a slaveholding society and a tool for criticizing it.
In 1776 and the years immediately following, interpretations of the Declaration varied significantly depending on social position. Many white Americans viewed independence as a reaffirmation of their existing liberties rather than a call for expanded equality. Enslaved people, by contrast, often interpreted the Declaration literally. During the Revolutionary War, thousands of enslaved people sought freedom by escaping to British lines or petitioning colonial governments, invoking the language of natural rights. Some enslaved petitioners explicitly cited revolutionary principles to argue that liberty should not be limited by race.
The Revolution also exposed tensions between slavery and republican government. Northern states, where slavery was less economically central, began gradual emancipation in the decades following independence. Southern states, however, became more deeply invested in slavery, particularly with the rise of plantation agriculture. This divergence highlights how the Declaration’s ambiguity allowed slavery to persist even as the nation claimed to be founded on liberty. The document did not resolve the contradiction; it deferred it.
The understanding of the Declaration immediately after 1776 therefore cannot be separated from slavery’s continued existence. While the Declaration asserted that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” enslaved people were explicitly excluded from political participation. The new nation expanded freedom for some while entrenching unfreedom for others. This selective application of liberty demonstrates that the Declaration was both revolutionary and conservative: revolutionary in its challenge to monarchical authority, but conservative in its willingness to preserve existing hierarchies.
Importantly, acknowledging that enslavers wrote the Declaration does not render the document meaningless or fraudulent. Instead, it demands a more complex reading. The Declaration reflects the moral limits of its authors while articulating ideals that exceeded those limits. This tension has defined American political history. Abraham Lincoln famously argued that the Declaration set forth a “standard maxim for free society,” one that was not fully realized at the nation’s founding but was meant to be pursued over time. From this perspective, the Declaration’s power lies not in its immediate fulfillment but in its enduring moral claim.
In conclusion, the fact that the Declaration of Independence was written and supported by enslavers reveals both the contradictions and the possibilities embedded in the American founding. Slavery shaped the language of the Declaration by imposing silences, compromises, and ambiguities, while also limiting how its claims were understood in 1776. Yet the institution of slavery also sharpened the document’s significance, as its universal language provided a basis for critique and resistance. The Declaration emerged from a society that denied freedom to many, but its principles have repeatedly been used to challenge that denial. Understanding this tension is essential to understanding both the document itself and the ongoing struggle to define the meaning of American freedom.
Assignment Instructions: Your assignment is to write a critique of one of these essays. What parts of the AI-generated essay’s argument do you agree with? Disagree with? What additional examples and evidence would you add to make a better paper? Ultimately, what would you change about this essay? How does this essay fit in with what we have learned in class so far? Is there additional course material that could be included to strengthen the argument? What sources did you need to use to check the essay? What do you think of the writing style, tone, and structure? Finally, reflect on how the AI-generated content surprised you. What does that tell you about using AI tools? Your critique and reflection should be 1000-1500 words.
1-5 assignment’s author: Jonathan Hanke, Ph.D.
Princeton University
James Alexander (Alec) Dun, PhD
Associate Dean for Curriculum
Director, First-Year Seminars Program
Faculty Athletics Representative to the NCAA
Princeton University
Jonathan Mercantini, PhD
Acting Associate Provost for Special Projects
Professor of History
Kean University