LLMs and the Future of Writing

Rethink how you write, reason and research in the age of AI. This course invites Master’s and PhD students to critically explore how LLMs (Large Language Models) are reshaping academic writing, judgment and critical thinking.

NOTE: This course requires a background in philosophy or a closely related field.

The course follows a seminar format with in-depth reading of texts related to the future of writing and related skills in the light of LLMs. In this course, we not only cover past works from the likes of Foucault, Flusser, and others, but also contemporary work in AI Ethics, which address the impact of LLM assistance on the skills and capacities needed to write well – recent topics of how LLMs influence epistemic agency, critical thinking, and reasoning.

Topics:

• Philosophy of Technology
• AI Ethics

More Specifically:

• LLM-Assisted Writing and Deliberation,
• Authorship and Ownership,
• LLM-Assisted Judgment and Reasoning,
• Decision-Making with AI,
• Deskilling,
• Critical Thinking,
• and Cognitive Offloading 

This course is offered as a Circle U. joint course, developed within the Circle U. framework and delivered in collaboration with partner universities. Teaching is carried out by international and interdisciplinary lecturers from the University of Vienna (Austria) and the University of Pisa (Italy).

The course page at the University of Vienna gives you more information on the course content.

In the first session students will be introduced to the topic and the recent literature in the field. The course will be assessed by means of

• student presentations (30%) 
• regular attendance and significant participation in discussions 
• commentaries on the literature 
• a short essay at the end of the course (max. 3000 words) (70%) 

Participants will receive a grade

Having read one paper each week and provided a presentation on at least one of the assigned readings, students will leave this course with a comprehensive sense of current conversations in the field of Philosophy of Technology and AI Ethics as it relates to the future of LLM assistance in writing, authorship, ownership, deliberation, and cognitive capacities core to writing well. Students will also work on their own writing and can contribute at the end of the semester.

In the last meeting of the semester, students can present the outlines of their final paper to the lead professor (Professor Coeckelbergh), and feedback will be given.