AI use, in any instance, is not permitted in the class. Every assignment is designed in order to provide you with the opportunity to engage with the material and develop your own thinking without corrosive interference. Violations of this policy will require in-person discussion and evaluation with me.
These are some of the considerations behind this policy:
This class is designed to improve your writing, thinking, and imaginative skills; if you’re not writing, thinking, or imagining, you’re not improving.
Using AI opens up academic honesty issues, both because it raises the question of whether the work is "your" work, and also because tools like ChatGPT rely on taking uncredited material from scholars and writers (see here)
Using AI does not produce reliably accurate results (see here, here, and here).
ChatGPT has serious negative environmental impacts. For instance, ChatGPT uses 7-10 times more energy than a Google search (see here), uses about one 16 oz water bottle for every 5-50 queries to cool its data centers (see here) and the C02 emissions for training a single large learning model are equal 125 round-trip flights between New York and Beijing (see here).
AI is also putting massive strain on the energy grid (see here) and data centers are disproportionately built in poor and rural communities who are already the inheritors of environmental racism and classism (see here, here, and here)
OpenAI and other AI companies have exploited workers from the global south, especially workers in prisons and refugee camps, and workers in Kenya, the Philippines, Colombia, and elsewhere (see here, here, here, here, here, and here)
AI companies are actively destroying knowledge archives and historical materials in order to consume, and ultimately degrade, language and discourse (see here).
A recent study from MIT (June 2025) found a significant drop in neural connectivity in ChatGPT users compared to those who used their brain only to complete writing assignments, suggesting there is a high cognitive cost to using LLMs (see here).
*this language is adapted from Olivia Stowell's AI policy
Technology Policy
No laptops, tablets, phones, or other digital readers are permitted while in this class or to read course materials at home except with explicit permission (which will be granted only in order to meet individual accessibility requirements). Recordings of productions will be available in Moodle and can be accessed on a device of your choosing out of class. All video materials will be projected in class and accessed collectively.
All in-class notes and commonplace entries must be written by hand. Papers and glossary entries can be typed and submitted through Moodle.
