Faculty are researching the use of generative artificial intelligence and integrating its use into courses, preparing students to use the latest technologies well.

When ChatGPT was unveiled in late 2022, it presented a daunting challenge to English instructors and others who assign writing to their students. Generative AI (GenAI) threatened to circumvent traditional writing processes by producing essays on demand, and it gave new urgency to questions concerning originality, academic integrity, and student assessment. 

In the years since then, the English department’s Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics (RWL) program has been at the forefront of those thinking about and responding to this seismic innovation. The Judith Anderson Herbert Writing Center created a web page titled GenAI Tools and Writing: Information and Guidelines for Students, and its tutors are trained to help students use this developing technology in ways that empower them as thinkers and writers. In 2025, English faculty members Kirsten Benson, Lisa King, Sean Morey, Jeff Ringer, and Hooman Saeli were awarded a UT GenAI Faculty Fellowship Program grant to integrate critical GenAI literacy instruction into English 102, the second course in the department’s composition sequence. Benson, the writing center director, has conducted research on first-year students’ reflections on AI and is co-leading a project investigating students’ classroom uses of AI; Morey has published articles on AI and a writing textbook incorporating GenAI material; and Saeli has published on the applications of AI tools in the second language (L2) writing classroom.

Starting next year, the department will offer an upper-level RWL course titled Writing with Generative AI. This course asks a number of important questions: How can writing with GenAI result in better, more advanced written products than writing without it? In addition, it asks, how can writing with GenAI help students understand their own writing processes better? How can writing with GenAI help students think more critically and selectively about when and how to use GenAI tools when writing? Finally, it asks, how can students remain in control of the human-machine collaboration and make the final decisions about rhetorical appropriateness?

Ringer, who proposed this new course, cautions against an irrational fear of GenAI. People, he points out, have always been worried about new writing technologies, whether these were printing presses, pencils with erasers, word processors, or the ready availability of Wikipedia. Eventually, he noted, all these technologies were incorporated into the way we write. 

“Generative AI is a technology that will shape how writing gets done and how we teach writing, but it likely won’t replace all of the other tools we’ve been using, and it won’t replace our brains.” He added, “We can use these tools to augment what we do, but as soon as we think of it as replacing us, it’s going to be deeply problematic, because these tools still aren’t capable of processing rhetorical situations or processing value. There’s always going to need to be a human component.”