As artificial intelligence becomes more integrated into student life and academia, UT’s Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center remains a valuable resource not only for writing, but for navigating generative AI as a tool as well.

The writing center’s Executive Director Kirsten Benson said that one of the center’s top priorities is to help students seek out AI literacy.

“It keeps on developing,” Benson said, “and it really is important for everyone to know how AI works when it comes to writing.”

A main way that the center believes that they can help is by having open conversations about AI usage with student writers.

“We feel like we could talk with them more,” Benson said. “We wish that there was a little bit more openness, because we could help students make decisions about their AI use.”

The center is also focused on informing students that they are not going to judge or police the AI use of student writers.

“We’re not the police, we’re not the AI police, and that’s not a reputation that we want,” Izzy Alexander, a writing center tutor, said. “I want, as a consultant, to have honest conversations with students about their work, because that’s what I’m interested in, that’s what makes me excited.”

Due to the increase in AI use since generative platforms like ChatGPT have popularized, UT writing center tutors have all been educated in AI literacy. Tutors were provided with a module during their year-long training process that taught them about the different kinds of generative AI, how to prompt it and what kind of text it outputs.

Alexander, an English masters student at UT, believes that understanding AI in this way allows for tutors to better help students.

“I want to be able to actually give you tips that you feel like can make your practice more productive,” Alexander said. “Having that honest conversation with students really helps.”

Benson agrees that the job of consultants in the center is to help someone make those decisions for themselves. When it comes to AI in the center, the biggest concern expressed by Benson is the decision making process for writers.

An integral part of the writing process, and something that is involved in every step, is making choices. According to the writing center at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, the human brain makes over 1,000 decisions during one project alone. Whether it be topic selection, picking out evidence, organization or word choice, the writing process involves thinking critically and deeply.

“The thing we have to be able to do is, again, make those choices, and AI can’t make those choices for you,” Benson said. “So, using AI will not help anyone develop what we call ‘writing intelligence.’”

Giving students the confidence and self-efficacy to write something on their own is something the center highlights.

“We feel that emphasis on becoming more confident in what you feel about yourself as a writer and getting to that feeling where it’s just like, ‘I can do this as a writer,’” Benson said. “We can do that much better than any AI can do.”

This is why, according to Benson, the writing center wants to help students navigate ways to use AI as a tool and not a replacement. While AI may improve a paper grammatically or give somebody an idea for their essay, the center’s goal is for students to improve individually as writers by making a lasting impact.

One of the more common ways students are using platforms like ChatGPT is brainstorming topics for writing projects, something the writing center has done with students since its formation.

Alexander described how students aren’t necessarily brainstorming in the traditional ways anymore, like working with a consultant or word-dumping on paper.

Instead of rebuking ChatGPT’s hold on the writing process of students, the center is set on understanding, aiding and growing with new technology.

“We are here to help writers at every stage, and part of that is working with AI too,” Alexander said.