Associate Lecturer of English Devori Kimbro is incorporating artificial intelligence into her fall 2024 English 2080 course. The focus is on helping students curious about majoring in English get familiar with all of the core tracks in the program—literature, rhetoric/composition and creative writing—all—through the lens of the career and music of Taylor Swift.
The course’s creative writing unit has objectives and outcomes intended to help students understand the creative writing process and to imitate the style of the target artist and/or discuss the mechanics successes/failures of an imitation. For the capstone assignment of this unit of the course in spring 2024, students were required to use AI to generate a song “in the style of Taylor Swift” with certain restrictions or expectations.
Students were directed to generate a song indicative of a certain era of Swift’s career, about content commonly discussed by Swift or in the style of a specific song. They took class discussion into account, Kimbro said, in composing an essay in response to an annotated version of their AI Swift songs that critiques the AI product.
“In general, the students will want to confront the mechanics of how AI works in generating content like this—drawing on commonly used phrases of Swift’s, drawing on fan speculation posted on social media,” Kimbro said.
Kimbro said Swift, “generates so much social media attention, it has already primed AI to answer questions according to fan discussion rather than actual information generated by Swift.”
Class discussion in the spring course, Kimbro said, took up the possibility that a few speculative AI versions of songs from Swift’s April 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, were circulating on social media as “leaks” in advance of the album’s release.
Assignment Deliverable
Students are required to submit their AI-generated poems and their prompts that produced them. Students are to annotate the poem extensively with an eye toward how AI sweeps social media and the internet to generate content. Students thenwrite a critique of the AI-generated song that delineates their findings and thoughts about how Taylor Swift’s online presence and fandom contribute to the creation of AI-generated content. Students also need to write about what they perceive as the limitations and strengths of AI-generated content using the information discussed in class on Swift’s career and catalog.
Students incorporate all of this work into a capstone essay.
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