When I first asked ChatGPT to outline my lecture, I felt the thrill of amplified creativity, but that lasted only in the first few times. Balancing AI’s power means acknowledging its role without letting it subsume ours. As Tang et al. remind us, “transparency in declaring the use of generative AI is vital to uphold the integrity and credibility of academic research writing.”
In practice, the grey zones are everywhere: Is summarizing primary sources with AI just good scaffolding or academic shortcut? Can we allow AI-driven captioning in class for accessibility but forbid it in formal assessments? Policies must draw clear boundaries, however it is difficult considering how little we know about AI extensibility. Transparent guidelines, akin to IRB declarations, could require students and faculty to note AI‑assisted sections, letting evaluators focus on original insight. AI could also be normalized as an assistive tool across all forms of assignments and in person discussion based evaluations might be prioritized instead.
Ultimately, defining “too much” is less about word count and more about intent. If AI amplifies human potential and honors ethical guardrails, it’s a tool; if it replaces responsibility, it’s overreach.
Generative AI has quickly become one of the most transformative technologies of our time since its mainstream debut in 2022. By early 2023, ChatGPT had gained over 100 million users, leading to widespread integration of AI into our daily lives. Using AI is not black and white, there are definitely many grey areas, especially while considering ethics and creativity which humans are still navigating.
Our readings this week raised an interesting point: “Generative AI tools are nonlegal entities and are incapable of accepting responsibility and accountability for the content within the manuscript. Additional ethical concerns beyond authorship issues include copyright implications arising from the use of third-party content, conflict of interest, and the broader concept of plagiarism which encompasses not only verbatim text copying but also the replication of ideas, methods, graphics, and other forms of intellectual output originating from others” (Lund et al.,2023) Lund and his co-authors point out that AI can’t be held responsible for what it creates. What happens if something goes wrong? and who would be held accountable? If AI writes something based on thousands of existing texts, who actually owns that work? As a student, It’s easy to blur the line between getting support and cutting corners. AI is convenient because you can ask it think critically for you, which defeats the purpose of learning. College is where students are supposed to develop their voice, and ability to communicate complex ideas.
For me, the key to developing my own perspective on academic and professional use of AI is transparency and balance. I think AI can be a great tool if we’re honest about how we use it as and make a conscience effort to not let it replace our own thinking. Just like with calculators, it’s not about banning the tech but about learning how to use it responsibly and with intention.
In last weeks lab, the class went on to use AI in ways to engage in creative thinking. This was done by using AI to generate a poem as a start. It was very generic due to the weak prompting at first but after giving it some more specific details about what kind of poem AI was supposed to write, the LLM started to get more sophisticated with the response. This applied to other applications such as building a DnD character in my case. I have not played DnD before, but I am aware of the creative freedom the journey’s can go on, so I wanted to see what ChatGPT would create for me. I asked for a character name, backstory, and suggested items to ChatGPT.
When it comes to this creative response, I have to say I do not agree that something needs to be novel in order for it the be creative. A lot of this response has pieces in it that are, on their own, not original. Though, when you consider all of the pieces put together to make this unique character. That’s when you get novelty, surprise, and value all in one (Arriagada & Arriagada-Brunea, 2022). The surprise factor comes from the character’s backstory alongside the value. More value can be expected if you intend on using this character during a campaign. That is why I thought this response was great for creative outlook. DnD is full of creativity, and you could seemingly regenerate the same prompt and get endless amounts of characters to choose from. This method of using AI in a field that is already very creative is a perfect use for it. Creating characters in this way can cut down on time thinking, or even completely, while creating a unique character to go on campaigns.
This week’s experiment challenged AI to do something uniquely human: write emotionally charged break-up dialogues. I tested how different models handled both a generic couple’s fight and a more specific prompt featuring Elena and Damon from The Vampire Diaries, to see if AI could show real creativity.
For this weekly AI lab, we gave different prompts to open AI. I used Gemini and Deepseek to generate the poem. First of all, I just typed the basic requirement, “write a haiku about happiness,” to both AIs. Then, I added ”a haiku about an abandoned amusement park at dusk, with a twist in the last line.”
It is undeniable that AI can indeed create very creative poems like human poets and writers. However, the advantages created by AI are that it is not easy for people to empathize with some poems written in the context of ancient, modern, and even the “future world” created by AI. Arriagada and Arriagada-Bruneau (2022) mentioned that AI has unique, novel and peculiar creativity. The robust database and algorithm can combine existing poem imitation and autonomous creativity to write better poems. For example, Germini wrote “The storm that cracks the distant coast, The market’s sudden, sharp decline, A future unforeseen, embossed.” AI uses poems to analyze the current situation of modern society, using the poems written in combination with modern society mentioned above.
Arriagada, L., & Arriagada-Bruneau, G. (2022). AI’s Role in Creative Processes: A Functionalist Approach. Odradek. Studies in Philosophy of Literature, Aesthetics, and New Media Theories, 8 (1), 77-110.
Poem generated by Germini
Poem generated by Deepseek
write a poem that involves chaos theory
Deepseek: A wingtip fractures the air— somewhere, a monsoon drowns a city. The pendulum knows this: its arc, a riddle of gravity and rage, swings wide enough to unstitch the sky.
We map the static between stars, trace fault lines in the static of our hands. Each fingerprint a cipher, each heartbeat a variable thrumming in the dark arithmetic of veins.
The mathematician whispers to the storm: Let me parse your chaos. Equations bloom like ink in water, unfolding into hurricanes, into eyelashes, into the way a match flickers before the forest burns.
Fractals coil in the curl of a fern, in the scream of a gull over oil-black waves. The universe, they say, is a clock wound by a god who loves dice. We count the faces, pray to the hollows between numbers—
for here, in the spin of a roulette wheel, in the stumble of a drunkard’s walk, the veil between chance and law is threadbare, trembling. All order is a ledger of accidents, all chaos a psalm of near-misses.
Hold still. The cosmos balances on the edge of a coin. Heads: a supernova. Tails: your breath, tonight, as you sleep— a minor turbulence, a storm in the lungs of the world.
This week, our class was exposed to two interesting readings about creativity and AI. The definition of creativity depends on each person’s perspective. From my own perspective, creativity should be something new from a person’s imagination. It can be based and built on existing materials, but it shows the uniqueness of an individual about a specific topic. Today, I tried prompting to AI (DeepSeek) to ask it to compose a poem with the theme based on its thoughts, and this was the result:
In the beginning, I was pretty surprised by how this poem looked like. Even though it doesn’t rhyme that much, it also has a certain meaning. The way DeepSeek used “library” as a metaphor for human thoughts is quite interesting. I was a little bit confused when I read the poem in the beginning, but overall, this was quite an experience for me since this is the first time I tried this type of prompt. In my opinion, the creativity of AI can be used as a supporter for humans to develop the process. As Arriagada wrote in the reading, “According to Hong, some individuals even claim that AI cannot achieve a creative performance on the same level as humans”. I quite agree with that idea since AI is created by humans, and the information it contains is mostly gathered from our existing information. However, I believe AI can develop more and more in the future with its potential. Therefore, I am looking forward to seeing more materials that we gonna learn about AI in upcoming sessions!
