A word on Artificial Intelligence

The Iowa Young Writers' Studio Summer Residential Program and online courses are designed to help students develop as creative writers. Artificial Intelligence may have a role to play in some forms of writing, but we don't believe it has a productive role for those learning to improve their writing in a workshop setting. Workshop students must learn to put their egos aside and be willing to submit imperfect work. Indeed, young writers learn more by getting constructive feedback on imperfect work than they do getting praise for polished work. Most importantly, students must be willing to do the hard work of writing themselves. Students who offload the writing process to AI avoid the very effort that is crucial to their development.

For this reason, at the Iowa Young Writers' Studio Summer Residential Program and in our online courses, students—not any other person, entity, or artificial intelligence affordance—must generate all written work for writing courses and assignments. This includes idea-generation and brainstorming, all process writing (drafts, revisions, final versions); summaries, interpretations, and critiques of their classmates’ work; and any other writing assigned in the course or activity. Students must not feed any of their classmate’s writing, or the writing of any other IYWS student, into any artificial intelligence affordance. If a student is asked to collaborate on a written assignment they may do so as long as they do not rely on any artificial intelligence affordance. If a student wishes to purposefully use or incorporate artificial intelligence in a specific writing project, they must get permission from their instructor and explicitly declare in their finished work how AI was used.