Spellcraft & Translation: Conjuring with AI

Submitter: Dana LeTriece Calhoun, U of Pittsburgh

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The experiment:

In Spring 2023, I taught a Black Rhetorics course that incorporated digital and new media Black rhetoric. This assignment was placed alongside theoretical and practical work discussing the intersections of Black rhetoric and language with digital hybrid models of analysis and composition. Specifically, “Spellcraft & Translation” was the major assignment exploring the act of Conjuring.

Spellcraft & Translation asked students to compose a comparative analysis between two originally-composed “spells” of their own and spells composed by the AI writing platform ChatGPT developed by OpenAI. Spells, in this case, are defined as technical instructional documents that convey an intention, purpose, and direction. The goal of this assignment was to introduce multiple rhetorical concepts such as genre, comparative analysis, poetics, instructional technical writing, knowledge and skill in working with AI writing technology, and sociocultural contexts.

The guiding questions behind this assignment were: What is Conjuring, in a contextual, compositional, and rhetorical sense? How do LLM or AI writing software “conjure” their responses to queries or prompts? How would a human-made response compare to an AI response to the same prompt?

Results:

At first, my students were cautiously excited about working with ChatGPT, having seen numerous reports about cultural anxiety surrounding AI writing. As we explored and engaged with ChatGPT together in class, many students revealed that they use ChatGPT or similar AI writing platforms to assist them in their personal and academic writing. As we discussed creative rhetorical work and language play, a key feature of Black Rhetoric, students shifted towards working with ChatGPT to generate jokes, humorous rhymes, or poems in preparation for this assignment.

Students overwhelmingly critiqued the “stilted” or “uncanny” phrasing and general rhetorical style of ChatGPT’s responses, especially when prompted to generate an original spell. Curiously, some students were able to “puzzle” through various prompts to ChatGPT in order to produce a more aesthetically pleasing and stronger writing style similar to their own spells.

If I were to do this assignment again, I would want to explore more in depth how users can specify their prompts to platforms like ChatGPT in order to “conjure” a specific output, especially in a creative way. While surface analysis of output from AI and human writing is key, I feel like we could have worked with ChatGPT to “shape” the output in a more intentional way.

Relevant resources: https://wac.colostate.edu/repository/collections/textgened/creative-explorations/spellcraft-translation-conjuring-with-ai/

Contact:

• Email: dlc89[AT]pitt[DOT]edu
• Twitter: @Treezypoo