Being able to communicate effectively is perhaps one of the most important life skills a person can have, and the means by which communication takes place has many forms – reading, writing, speaking, non-verbal, sign-language, body, language, etc. etc. The mastery of communication takes a life-time to master and something that takes practice. For example, the more you read, the better writer you become; The more you write, the better you communicate and understand others. This course is not only a requirement in the educational plan, but is a course that will help you in all courses, your career, and communicating with people in the world.

AI tools are incredible and can be very useful - especially in a reading and writing class. Yup! You read that correctly. I think AI can be an incredibly useful. However, relying solely on AI for this class to complete assignments and/or tasks is considered an act of misconduct and acts of academic dishonesty. Even if you take an AI generated paragraph and change every five words to your own writing - it's still academic dishonesty.

AI tools, like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google Bard, etc. can be a very useful part of our writing process. They can help us brainstorm, organize our ideas, and provide support for grammar and syntax. However, presenting AI generated content as your own is considered plagiarism. Any use of AI to develop or generate ideas needs to include a direct citation, just as you would include for other outside sources. In our class, we will utilize AI as a tool that is part of our learning process, not as a way to produce first and only drafts (i.e. putting an assignment prompt into ChatGPT, and submitting the work that is generated as your paper - that is plagiarism).  AI tools can also have significant limitations when used for academic applications. AI tools like ChatGPT are considered Large Language Models (LLMs), which means that they can comprehend language structures, grammar, context, and semantic linkages since they have been trained on huge amounts of text data (i.e. all of the text making up the web and much of English literature). These machines work as pattern recognition engines, so when they answer a question you have posed, they are attempting to complete a pattern they have identified, whether or not that pattern is real, accurate, or factually correct. LLM’s frequently “hallucinate” or make things up in their answers. This means that you need to fact check, edit, and revise all content that is generated by AI tools. Citations that are provided in AI answers are typically inaccurate or made up, so I would encourage you to utilize other, more accurate tools when conducting research.  Lastly, I just want to say that this class is about you - your ideas, thoughts, feelings, and interpretations. Who you are as a person, all of the experiences that have made up your life, are an important and valuable part of not only this class, but of the college as a whole. You have a place here and your story deserves to be told. I want to read writing that shows me this - that lets me get to know who you are and how you view the world - not writing that is generated by a machine. When you’re tempted to use AI because you feel like you have nothing to say or that your ideas are not sophisticated enough, please know that this is not true. You do have important things to say, and I want to hear them.