1 What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Take a look at the cover image for this textbook. What do you notice?

It’s probably clear to you that I used a generative artificial intelligence tool (DALL-E 3 through ChatGPT 4o) to create this image. I started an entertaining journey of image creation misadventures with this simple prompt:

“Can you please draw an image of a centaur shaking hands with a cyborg? The centaur and cyborg should be in the center of the image, with a rainbow and mountains blurred in the background. Use a high fantasy art style.”

Spoiler alert: It really couldn’t do this. We engaged in a series of back and forths where I tried to teach it what centaurs and cyborgs are, and it told me without blushing that there was no horn on the man’s head. Here’s the version of the prompt I used to get the cover result:

“I want two central images. 1. A centaur. A centaur has a human (man or woman) head and torso and hands. It has a horse’s body, flanks, four legs, and tail. 2. A cyborg. A cyborg is part human and part machine. It has two legs like a human and stands on two legs. Please use a whimsical children’s book illustration style and include a rainbow and mountains in the background” (Open AI, 2024).

What I got instead was this: a mishmash image of a human unicorn/centaur shaking hands with a robot centaur. The rainbow looks good though.

Just for fun, here are a few other things the image generator came up with.

First, here’s an example of AI art that resembles a lot of what I am seeing on the Internet right now. There’s something deeply strange but almost mystical about its strangeness. Someday soon there’ll be a whole scholarly field devoted to interpreting and deciphering generative AI “art.”

The closest the image generator got to my personal vision for the cover is the one below (but the centaur still has a horn on its head. Why???)

My challenges in working with DALL-E 3 to realize my vision for our textbook cover are indicative in many ways of both the promise and pitfalls that working with AI tools bring to the writing classroom. What experiences have you personally had with generative artificial intelligence tools (yes, SnapChat AI counts!)? Are your experiences positive, negative, or a mix? If you’ve never tried an AI tool before, that’s fine too!

Before we learn more about generative AI tools and how they can be used in academic writing, I’d like to know more about where you are at right now with generative artificial intelligence. Please take this five-minute anonymous survey about your experiences with AI.

The Future? Hybrid Writing in College Classrooms

This book represents a new type of writing collaboration. I wrote this book with help from Claude, ChatGPT 4o, Microsoft Copilot, and other AI tools. I have also created and incorporated some custom AI tools to help you improve your own writing process and designed activities to use generative AI tools throughout the textbook. This model is what Wharton School of Business Professor Ethan Mollick has termed “co-intelligence.” In his book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Mollick outlines four basic principles for using generative artificial intelligence tools in writing or other types of work:

Because I like to read science fiction and fantasy, I’m calling this “co-intelligence” writing textbook Cyborgs and Centaurs. As the generative AI text-to-image prompt above explained, cyborgs are hybrid creatures–half human and half machine. And centaurs are also hybrid creatures–half human and half magic. In my own experiences working with generative AI tools since late 2022, I have found that both concepts reflect how I feel about writing with AI.

In this book, we will explore how to apply Mollick’s principles as we learn to become academic thinkers, researchers, and writers. We will learn where AI can be helpful–and where it can be harmful. We’ll consider the ethics of using generative AI. And we’ll practice specific use cases where AI can improve our writing processes.

I hope we’ll have some fun along the way.