When Robots Learn to Write, What Happens to Learning?

Bill Hart-Davidson

Can we live, together, with robots who write? This talk will focus on recent accelerations in the drive to automate the writing process—particularly in digital networks and the implications of those changes for teaching and learning. Machine learning and large language models have brought us to an inflection point. We must now work to understand these new technologies and our work as writers and teachers of writing differently. Drawing on examples from his own scholarship in the areas of education, health care, statecraft and warfare, Dr. Bill Hart-Davidson will suggest some practical and ethical guidelines for the ways we might live and work, together, with robots that write.

Bill Hart-Davidson earned his Ph.D. in 1999 in Rhetoric & Composition from Purdue University. He is a Senior Researcher in the Writing in Digital Environments research center and Associate Dean of Research Graduate Education in the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. He has published over 75 articles and book chapters and is co-inventor of Eli Review, a software service that supports writing instruction.

Sponsored by Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition, Writing Across the Curriculum, SU Project Advance, Center for Student Learning and Success and Center for Teaching and Learning Excellence.