Celebrating the Humanities: The 2024 English Club Conference
By Anna Paduano
The University at Buffalo’s College of Arts and Sciences is home to 14 arts and humanities departments. Within these departments, students study human culture through literature, history, art, music, and philosophy to better understand the human experience. The 2024 English Club Conference was a celebratory event focused on bringing awareness to what makes UB students — and people around the world — human. Students, alumni, and faculty gathered together in O’Brian Hall on Saturday morning for the event they have been waiting for all year.
Ellie Dermody, President of the English Club: “Honestly, we have the event in the first place because we like having an annual event to look forward to, an annual event that brings professors and students together. We like choosing current topics to center the conference around, and it’s a fun way to get involved and see other people’s point of view on hot topics. Our goal is always to have a space for English enthusiasts to meet people, network, and discuss topics interesting to them, whether that space be our discord server, our general body meetings, or the conference.”
The conference hosted eight student presenters, and a professor-led roundtable discussion centered around academia, teaching, and artificial intelligence. Jonah Ruddock presented Ecopoetics and Poetry of Contamination, which focused on the use of creative coding to produce poetry. During an interview with Ruddock, he stated “A challenge of ecopoetry is the necessity of de-centering the human ego in order to speak to the complexity and interrelatedness of the systems we’re a part of. Artificial intelligence and online tools like the travesty generator used in Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s poetry allow you to be in conversation with something non-human, forcing you to give up a degree of control and honoring the kind of randomness one finds in nature.” With the rapid development of technology, writers can now use artificial intelligence to produce anything from an email to a poem. While this use of AI may seem to be a time efficient option, writers are now asking: will creative writing become obsolete? With this question being difficult to answer, the students turned to the professor panel for help.
Throughout the discussion How do Professors Really Feel About AI, Dr. Walt Hakala, Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins, Dr. Paul Feigenbaum, Dr. Nicholas Hoffman, and Dr. Richard Feero sought to address students’ questions about artificial intelligence. “Especially in the humanities, we have had a long-term conversation about the death of the humanities and it’s always the STEMification of the University is what’s going to be the death of the humanities… everything is going to be the death of the humanities. But what gives me a lot of hope about the humanities going forward is things like this, you all coming together talking about Chaucer on Discord. There is something abiding about that that continues to bring students in. And I find that the panic about AI is not warranted.”
Creative writing will always be needed in real-world applications, the skill will adapt to the roll out of AI. Some of the effects artificial intelligence has had on the humanities include streamlined research methods, reliance on ChatGPT, and changes in critical thinking and creative writing. The roll out of artificial intelligence in academia was argued to be too fast, allowing for increased defect in the learning process.
Cue the 2001: A Space Odyssey soundtrack. Academic integrity and ChatGPT — the discussion everyone has been waiting for. What is considered academic dishonesty? Can students prompt ChatGPT in a way that can be considered skillful? What if AI actually helps reduce writer’s block and improves writing abilities? The panel responded with, “The reason that professors can generally find it easy to tell when students are using AI is because they are not doing a good job of it. The text they are producing looks lifeless, it doesn’t look like it was written by an original voice. But the alternative, if a student understood how to prompt the technology really well and could produce something, maybe tweak it a little bit with their capabilities as an editor, and produce something that I couldn’t tell was generated by AI… I think that is a useful skill. Should I be angry with a student for doing that or should I recognize that is a skill that is going to be necessary in the 21st century? I go back and forth on that; I don’t think it is an obvious answer that I should be angry about that.”
All of this to say that authenticity and originality are paramount to research and writing. Wrestling with texts is time consuming but in order to further develop various skills, students must be presented with challenges. Students reported throughout the roundtable discussion that they feel better about their academic research and writing when they took the time to curate a piece authentically. Being a student is understanding your academic limitations and learning how to work in congruence with them.
