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In fall 2024, Associate Lecture of Devori Kimbro will incorporate artificial intelligence into her English 2080 course, which she said will focus on helping students curious about majoring in English to gain a basic familiarity with all 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 creative writing unit has objectives and outcomes aligned with helping students understand the process of creative writing 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, students will be required to use AI to generate a song “in the style of Taylor Swift” with certain restrictions or expectations. They will 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. Students will take “what we have discussed in the previous units into account,” Kimbro said, “to compose 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.” In preparation for this, Kimbro said, she will talk about how Swift, “who generates so much social media attention, has already primed AI to answer questions according to fan discussion rather than actual information generated by Swift.” Also part of planned discussion in the course, Kimbro said, is the potential that a few speculative AI versions of songs off Swift’s April 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department, are circulating on social media as “leaks,” and the Swiftie community is trying to figure out whether the songs are legitimate. “It’s a fascinating and ongoing discussion in the artistic community that we will for sure be tackling once we know whether these tracks are authentically Swift’s or not.” Assignment DeliverableStudents will be required to submit their AI-generated poem and their prompt that produced it. Students are to annotate the poem extensively with an eye toward how AI sweeps social media and the internet to generate content. Students then will write 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. This work will be the capstone essay for this unit of the course. College of Arts and Sciences Dean Pam Riggs-Gelasco awarded a $500 stipend to Kimbro for her proposal to incorporate AI into a course module.