In August, Cedarville University became the first evangelical Christian university to implement campus-wide educational ChatGPT. This has been met with a lot of different responses—enthusiasm, fear, disdain, apathy. I know some people who use it for everything. I know others who would equate AI use as an unforgivable sin.
I’m Sophie, a senior studying Professional Writing and Information Design, and I land somewhere in the middle, if a bit on the “less AI” side. But there are some specific contexts where I do (or do not) use genAI—so let’s take a look at those!
In my education
The first day of class, all of my professors banned using ChatGPT to generate assignment content. As a writing major taking mostly writing and design classes, I should not have been as surprised as I was.
The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. The Center for Teaching and Learning produces a podcast—Transform Your Teaching. In a recent episode, Dr. Barbara Oakley gave an example of one of her friends who sent her a book written using ChatGPT which ended up being the worst book she’d ever read. She explained that her friend, while incredibly intelligent, lacked background knowledge in writing stories. Since he didn’t know what good fiction looked like, he wasn’t able to think critically about what ChatGPT generated.
My major is Professional Writing and Information Design, colloquially known as PWID (it rhymes with ‘squid’). While PWID is a notoriously broad major that no one seems to be able to pin down, the overall goal is that I graduate with background knowledge on what effective and engaging writing, design, and editing looks like.
The writing classes I’m taking right now are designed to teach me what good writing should look like. My coding class is designed to teach me what HTML does and how it works. My theology class is designed to teach me how to do theology without committing doctrinal heresy. For me, the best way to learn these skills (and learn how to learn these skills) is to be directly involved in the process.
In my job
In PWID, there is a running stereotype that everyone in the major has at least two additional jobs.
I contribute to the stereotype.
Besides being a full-time student, I work as a student Instructional Designer at the CTL, a tutor in the Writing Center, and a (self-taught) arts and entertainment journalist for Cedars, the student news group. Out of all these jobs, I only use GenAI in the CTL—a department where ChatGPT usage is highly encouraged and promoted. I am by far the person least experienced with GenAI, but I’ve used it for a few tasks:
- Formatting: I was recently taught that ChatGPT can format Canvas rubrics—a task that not only takes me a long time to do by hand but also involves a lot of tedious revising if something needs to be changed or updated. Using a specially engineered ChatBot, I’ve been able to adjust and create rubrics faster and more easily.
- Research: I have done research for the Transform Your Teaching podcast. This involves looking up journal articles, understanding what they say, and judging whether they fit with the episode topic and should be used as a resource. As a writing major, I struggle to translate these journals out of scientific educationese. I’ve used ChatGPT to locate journal articles (providing sources) with specific characteristics then summarize their abstracts into a list, which I can then send to the podcast managers to review.
However, I do prefer to edit by hand. I have used ChatGPT to check for grammar errors and help word things consistently, but I do complete at least one initial pass-through with paper. This gives me a general idea of what the course consists of and helps me make sure everything in the course uses consistent wording.
In my personal life
In what little free time I have left, I work as an artist and fiction writer. Here, I have one guiding principle—I do not use Generative AI to produce creative work.
I have a reason for this. Creative activities—writing a comic, drawing digital art, experimenting with hand-drawn animation, playing an online roleplaying game with my friends—are all activities I do for personal enjoyment. While there are parts of these activities that I don’t like doing, such as writing description or drawing in-between frames, and there are times where what I end up with doesn’t match my expectations, I enjoy engaging with the process and feel satisfied with my end product.
ChatGPT is a tool. It is incapable of feeling joy from creating and producing art or fiction. I don’t want to use it to skip the process, because I get joy from the act of creating.
Principles
Generative AI is revolutionizing processes in almost every field—education, work, leisure. Companies expect potential employees to have more experience with AI tools.
After reflecting, I’ve drafted three personal principles for how I AI:
- Learn the process before automating it. The reason I don’t use AI frequently is because I, predominantly, am learning how to do things. There are places in my process where using ChatGPT could help me—editing, refining wording, formatting. Before I use it, though, I want to get my hands on the process and see what I can figure out.
- Always go back and check things. I have seen ChatGPT hallucinate sources. Whenever possible, I ask for where it’s pulling information from, look it up, and compare it. When generating text, I also go back over the text and edit to better fit the context.
- GenAI is a tool and should be treated as such. I should use it. I should also not rely on it as my only method of attack (see point 1).
These will change as AI, the workforce, and I change. But I’m beginning to realize I use ChatGPT even less than I thought. In my current context, I’m okay with this.
- Student Perspectives: GenAI and the General Writing Major - October 14, 2025