In Defense of Invention: AI, First Year Composition, and Literacy Narratives

Abstract

This reflective essay chronicles a semester-long experiment in a multilingual first-year writing course, where traditional invention techniques were juxtaposed with AI-driven outlining. Drawing on my own graduate-school practice of freewriting as a heuristic (Lauer 2004) and Aristotle’s notion of invention, I first guided students through ten-minute freewrites on rhetorical conventions learned at home versus in U.S. classrooms. I then, tentatively, had them submit those freewrites to ChatGPT to generate literacy-narrative outlines—an exercise that conflicted with my belief in writer-generated discovery. Through class discussion and close reading of both AI- and student-generated outlines, we identified how ChatGPT’s pattern-matching produced generic structures that often diverged from students’ rich, culturally specific experiences. This comparison served as a low-stakes introduction to rhetorical analysis and reinforced our Information Literacy outcome by treating AI output as a “secondary source” to be evaluated for relevance, credibility, and ethics. The study reveals that while AI can suggest organizational possibilities, it cannot invent authentically or gauge audience emotion. Ultimately, I argue that genuine invention—and ethical, powerful writing—emerges from students’ unique voices and critical engagement with both human and machine-generated texts.