FUTURE SKILLS FOR WRITING WITH AL

 This understanding of the process is essential to the writing futures of our students. Process writing, which requires creative brainstorming, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing involves students in writing activities that are authentic and meaningful, for real audiences, purposes, and contexts. NAPLAN, in contrast, demands writing for no given audience, on artificial unseen topics, under exam conditions. Even before the arrival of AI writers, this narrowed writing regime was producing writers with highly formulaic writing styles: I meet these writers daily in my lectures and tutorials. Now, this kind of writing is readily done by machines.

The challenge for teachers is to develop their students as confident, critical, creative, courageous, empathetic, highly skilled, and adaptive human writers who are educated to break rules, not just comply with them. Learning the basics will always be important. But this will not be enough. Writing effectively now means writing with AI, breaking down the human/machine boundary in ways that go way beyond spellchecking. It will become usual for any initial draft of a piece of writing to be generated by AI, at least in parallel with a human effort, for comparison, synthesis, and revision by humans. This human-machine co-writing will not be regarded as cheating, just as spellchecking is not regarded as cheating either. It will be considered to be strategic use of digital resources to maximize the impact of writing. AI’s contribution to this partnership will be via split-second dexterity in, for example, researching and presenting information, search engine optimization, translating into multiple languages, sourcing and incorporating multimodal elements such as images and sound, laying out pages, writing headings and subheadings, and referencing.

Humans, with a sound background in understanding algorithmic thinking, can take AI outputs and shape them for real purposes, audiences and contexts. Skills in evaluating and manipulating text will be highly valued. Knowing when to use AI and when to use human skills will be important. Judging the affordances and constraints of various AI tools will also be vital. Ethics, integrity via the monitoring of the provenance of words, and critical attention to potential bias will be as well.