Generative AI and the Future of Writing Pedagogy

In a recent blog post addressing AI’s impact on writing-intensive university courses, the management professor Ethan Mollick makes an intriguing comparison. “Think,” he writes, “of how the calculator completely changed what was valuable to teach, and the nature of math teaching overall…Now, what happened to math is going to happen to nearly every subject in every level of education.” The purpose of this roundtable is to grapple with the validity and implications of these kinds of pronouncements, bringing experts in undergraduate writing instruction from across the University of Toronto together to discuss how advances in generative-AI technologies will—or will not—reshape the future of writing pedagogy. 

Questions that may be addressed include: to what extent is the comparison between mechanical calculation and automated writing a fair or accurate one? Is generative AI in fact poised to transform “nearly every subject,” including the teaching of writing, or do the expectations surrounding this technology outstrip its current (and perhaps future) capacity? What possibilities exist for the writing classroom of the future, and what role (if any) will generative AI play in shaping their emergence?