This special issue of the Journal of Writing Research brings together seven empirical studies of the relationship between writing and generative AI, examining what can be systematically observed and measured about the functioning of generative AI in educational and professional writing contexts. Collectively, the studies demonstrate the necessity and value of methodological pluralism for investigating a complex, rapidly evolving phenomenon. In their contributions, the researchers use experimental comparisons, mixed-methods intervention designs, corpus-based analyses, computational linguistic techniques, and qualitative interpretive approaches. Taken together, these methods enable lines of inquiry that no single approach could sustain: comparisons of AI and human performance in professional writing tasks; analyses of how writers at different ages and levels of expertise engage AI tools; examinations of how assessment systems register and respond to AI-generated prose; and investigations of how human readers interpret texts with ambiguous authorship. By foregrounding both the affordances and limitations of different methodological traditions, the articles present a multifaceted approach to the study of writing and generative AI.

AI-based natural language production systems are currently able to produce unique text with minimal human intervention. Because such systems are improving at a very fast pace, teachers who expect students to produce their own writing—engaging in the complex processes of generating and organizing ideas, researching topics, drafting coherent prose, and using feedback to make principled revisions that both improve the quality of the text and help them to develop as writers—will confront the prospect that students can use the systems to produce human-looking text without engaging in these processes. In this article, we first describe the nature and capabilities of AI-based natural language production systems such as GPT-3, then offer some suggestions for how instructors might meet the challenges of the increasing improvement of the systems and their availability to students.

Contributors to this symposium recall and reflect on changes of mind they have experienced, noting the relationship of these to larger concerns of English studies as a profession.

This webtext examines the practices of authorial attribution in textual production in higher education (where notions of individual authorship and intellectual property prevail, particularly at military academies) and in the military (which has a more public conception of authorship).

Review of Service-Learning in Technical and Professional Communication by Melody Bowdon and J. Blare Scott. New York: Longman, 2003.