The Communicator

by Jordan Paik

Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has been a major topic of conversation in many professional and academic settings. Boston University administrators recently formed an AI Task Force to “help develop a coordinated University-wide approach and set of best practices” regarding AI use.

Lisa Liberty Becker is both an alumnus and Master Lecturer of BU’s College of Communication. She currently teaches COM CO 201 (Intro to Communications Writing) and COM CO 532 (Copyediting Fundamentals). She is also a published journalist with The Washington Post, the Boston Globe Magazine and other publications. She currently works with the Boston Federal Reserve as a copyeditor.

AI is becoming a more talked about topic in the academic and professional setting. As a professor in COM, what are some of your general thoughts about this development of AI?

So, part of our job in COM is to help our students sharpen their skills and to get them ready for whatever comes beyond COM… [AI] has permeated almost every industry. In terms of publication and editing, it has become very widespread and I think that it is for better and for worse. I think it’s very important to teach good writing skills, and that’s what I do in my classes. I think it’s also important to be aware of the pitfalls of these tools. But I don’t think it’s helpful to be in denial that they exist.

What was your thought process for bringing ChatGPT into your COM CO 201 class? What were you trying to achieve?

What we did [in class] was talk about [ChatGPT] and test it out. In the press release assignment, we wrote a press release ourselves and then inputted our commands into ChatGPT to analyze the differences in writing. I encouraged everyone to see what the limitations of AI were, and I think the goal of that was to show students that it is not a good substitute for writing — specifically the type of writing we are preparing students for. We talked about this in our class ad nauseam: the writing is generic, bland, lacks specific detail, and is inaccurate. So you cannot rely on it as a substitute for learning how to write and how to edit, and for learning grammar. There’s currently no tool that will do all that, whether it’s a grammar checker or “Grammarly.” They are getting more sophisticated but I think we’re a long way off from not having to learn how to write.

What are some differences you see between students’ writing now, with new AI tools around, versus years prior when these sorts of tools did not exist?

The faculty has been talking about how student writing is a little bit more cleaned up than it was in the past. On a much bigger picture, more philosophically, there’s an internal debate that I have. I don’t want to pretend like these tools don’t exist. However, if you are relying on tools, does that disrupt your thought process and make you a less skilled writer overall? Maybe. And there are certainly people who will say that with any use of a tool in your writing process, you’re gonna rely on the tool and not learn how to do it yourself. That’s the conundrum, really.

There are varying views toward AI among BU professors, where some don’t want students to even look at tools like ChatGPT. What is your stance on this in terms of academic policies?

I mean that’s the debate that we’re having in faculty meetings right now. Passing ChatGPT writing as your own is plagiarism, so I don’t encourage students to use it to write for you. Just talking to students, some use it as a brainstorming tool, and so on, and there are certainly people who believe that is wrong. I tend to be more descriptive than prescriptive, so my mind just goes to: how are people using it and what are the pitfalls? Whatever policy BU comes out with and however the individual colleges deal with that, I think there are going to still be some students that use it. So this is just my personal opinion: it’s out there, and it’s free so I would rather play around with it a little in class than ignore its existence…

I think that it’s challenging for students to go to different classes and have all these different policies. I’m not saying it could be any different [because] there was no advanced warning—all of a sudden [ChatGPT] was released, and then immediately we started the spring semester last year. There was no “hey, look at this beta version and test it out…” All of a sudden, it was just out. So there was no preparation [to form proper policies].

I do see the validity in those who take the hard stance of “don’t use it at all.” I’m a little bit different than taking that very hard stance, at the risk of: I don’t want to encourage students to use it as a substitute for learning communication writing.

This piece has been edited for length and clarity.