Our goal is to work toward a responsible future that embraces AI in writing without dehumanizing it.

Vision

While AI that creates content may seem to undermine the work of writing educators and the advancements in written communication, we see a different future. We believe that properly harnessed, AI can enhance the writing process, making it more fluid, democratic, and inclusive.

Our vision is guided generative AI, which will free up writers’ time to focus on critical thinking skills, planning, and communicating substantive ideas. This approach will also address the cognitive and motivational barriers that have hindered the scaling of writing education. 

AI makes writing more “effective” by restricting the actions of writing to those that can only be entrusted to a human writer.

Solution—myScribe

myScribe is an AI-enhanced online writing studio with a suite of generative and assessment tools supporting the writing process from initial-phase writing to the completion of the final draft. Instead of starting with a blank page, writers using myScribe are supported with a writing task definition, consisting of a common outline and a set of writing task-specific questions that stand in for reader expectations.

One of the key features of myScribe is the AI-based tool called Notes-to-Prose. This tool translates the writer’s notes into prose without adding new ideas. In other words, the generative AI is guided to reflect the quality of the writer’s notes in prose. This early-stage support significantly reduces the cognitive load of sentence crafting, allowing writers to focus their attention on higher-level planning and organization. This unique capability of myScribe should instill confidence in educators and stakeholders about its potential to enhance writing efficacy.

As the writer develops their draft, myScribe offers AI-based assessment tools utilizing automated feedback and the interactive visualization of the writer’s composing decisions. These tools allow writers to evaluate their drafts from several perspectives, including reader expectations, logical flow, content coverage, and sentence clarity.

History

For the past twenty-five years, we have explored how digital writing environments incorporating Natural Language Processing and interactive visualization might ease the cognitive load of writers and enhance their experience of the writing process. A suite of these experimental digital tools, called DocuScope, was designed to offer automatic feedback, with the aim of maintaining a writer’s engagement without the need for teacher supervision. Our digital work predates the rise of generative AI; but, we have discovered that the strategic deployment of generative AI complements our vision of placing the human writer at the forefront of the writing process, while also democratizing access to an enhanced writing process for a broader population.

Acknowledgments

• Dietrich College of Humanities & Social Sciences
• Department of English

Collaborators

• Eberly Center, Teaching Excellence & Educational Innovation, Carnegie Mellon University
• Open Learning Initiative, Carnegie Mellon University