At the UNL Writing Center, we are wholeheartedly committed to helping writers at all levels develop their own abilities to express themselves in writing, from the beginning to the end of that process. It has always been our mission to support writers on their own writing. For example, we have never permitted writers to get feedback on behalf of a friend or relative, because it’s not possible to engage in a back-and-forth conversation about where the ideas came from and what the writer’s intentions are.
Writing generated by an LLM (e.g., ChatGPT) is similar, in that it is difficult to have a conversation about ideas and phrasing which aren’t the writer’s own. While there are many generative AI products that claim to make the writing process easier, we believe that writers only develop their capabilities to their fullest extent by participating in the process from start to finish. To that end, we have the following guidelines around generative AI use in the Writing Center.
We will:
- Take time at the start of each session to understand your goals and how we can best support that process
- Discuss strategies to brainstorm, draft, and revise work without the use of genAI
- Be supportive, encouraging listeners as you work through every stage of the writing process
- Ask you engaging questions in order to help you develop your own ideas
- Help you explore a range of options for how to express these ideas in your own voice, with final decisions about word choice, sentence construction, etc. remaining in your own hands
- Assist you with making plans for drafting and/or revising beyond the end of the appointment
We will not:
- Report students to their professors or their colleges for using genAI
- Upload students’ work into genAI for any reason
- Refuse to work with writers who have utilized genAI prior to the appointment (although individual consultants may opt out of working on writing that is not composed by a human)
- Promote genAI as a substitute for writing and feedback done by humans
- Approach genAI use uncritically
- Use genAI in a session unless both the writer and consultant agree
(Adapted from the Generative AI Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Writer’s Workshop)