In the Department of English and Creative Writing, we urge students not to use large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools in any of their reading, writing, peer reviewing or workshopping unless their instructors provide explicit permission to do so.
We have designed our literature and creative writing courses to help students develop their abilities to read with attention and care, to create their own new work in and across literary genres, to think critically about primary and secondary source materials, to conduct thoughtful research, and to develop nuanced and sophisticated ideas about literary works — both others’ and their own. We organize and conduct our small, discussion-based classes to develop close working relationships between students and faculty and among students. Our trust-based relationships enable intellectual and creative risk-taking, growth and flourishing.
We delight in what makes our creative writing and our literary scholarship human — its messiness, its playfulness, its challenges, its surprises, its discoveries. The written work we create reflects our hard-earned wisdom and lived experience. It asks questions about the world and the people, beings, things and forces who inhabit it. What we daily undertake in our classrooms and workshop communities is a quiet but deliberate celebration of the human imagination and its natural impulse to make and share stories and art.
Machine writing threatens the very purpose of what we set out to do in the classroom and undermines the difficult but gratifying work of literary creation and interpretive engagement. Through apparent shortcuts that actually come at great human and environmental cost, generative AI tools reduce students’ ability to develop their own ideas and to make use of uncertainty and complexity, in the long run thinning their abilities to learn and to solve intellectual and creative problems with flexibility and resilience. Perhaps more grievously, they seek to turn writing into a product, robbing us of the joyful, messy and patient process of artmaking, and of the educational value inherent to reading and writing critically and creatively.
Asking a generative AI tool to produce one’s writing is asking it to do one’s thinking and creating. The writing we assign is not just a series of tasks to get through as quickly as possible. It constitutes a way of thinking and even of being in the world. Generative AI tools perpetuate the passing off of others’ intellectual and creative work as one’s own, in turn damaging the trust necessary for mutually respectful teaching, learning and working relationships.
As faculty members, we do not use generative AI tools to create our teaching materials or to assess student work, not least because LLMs are built on stolen creative works and threaten the livelihoods of young people. Indeed, the majority of us have had our scholarly and creative work used to train LLMs without consent or compensation. Students should not submit our teaching materials or classmates’ written work — or any published or unpublished piece of writing assigned to them — to any AI chatbot or tool.
As a faculty, we reject the use of “artificial intelligence” as an easy substitute for writing and thinking in our classrooms. We strongly encourage you to keep your writing free of machine-generated language (including predictive text and text produced by Grammarly) unless you have received explicit permission from your instructor to use an AI tool.
September 2026