Generative AI technologies and platforms–like ChatGPT, Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and Soundful.com–are a fundamental part of the digital landscape. Being able to work with these tools in meaningful, creative, and ethical ways is essential to what it means to be digitally literate today. As such, banning these tools from our educational space seems counterproductive, especially in writing classrooms where the act of writing is intimately intertwined with digital technologies. So we’ve taken a different approach at IU Bloomington. I was asked by my composition colleagues (particular those of us who direct or coordinate the courses that make up our writing program) to generate a syllabus statement reflective of our values/approaches. What I created was not a policy statement per se, but rather an Ethics of Practice–meant to help students think about how to responsibly use Generative AI, whether creating text, image, sound, or other.

You can access the PDF of the document here: https://indd.adobe.com/view/05b8760e-5666-494f-a63b-84c8419c3551

Feel free to borrow, adopt, adapt as you see fit. Credit would be nice, but in truth just knowing folks are taking a proactive and not reactive (and policing) approach is more than enough. We are all awash in this moment where Generative AI is emerging faster than we can react to it (particularly a programmatic level). Moreover, the assortment of tools available are just incredibly promising for what they offers composition, especially multimedia composition, and no amount of burying our head in the sand is going to put the genie back in the bottle (…to mix a couple metaphors).