Using AI to help me create anything used to feel completely off-limits. It was one of those personal taboos—something I’d avoid like the plague. I didn’t see it as a tool; I saw it as a shortcut, or worse, as a way of letting technology do the work for me.

This class has completely reshaped that perspective. I’ve started to understand AI not as a replacement for creativity, but as a complement to it—a means of extending what I can already do. Of course, there are still limits to what feels like “acceptable” use, and I think we’re all still negotiating those boundaries. But I now see AI more like using a stencil—a really, REALLY, smart stencil, but still a stencil. If I use one to draw a circle, didn’t I still make the circle? Of course I did. It just took less time, and it’s actually round instead of a lopsided oval. Sometimes, a little help simply makes the work cleaner, not less authentic.

Applying AI in a technical writing context has changed how I approach my work both in this class and in professional settings. It’s helped me experiment with different ways to convey the same ideas, refine my tone, and maintain greater consistency. Ironically, when AI struggles to interpret my writing, that confusion exposes where my writing needs more clarity. In that sense, the tool helps – not by fixing the writing for me, but it helps me identify where revision is needed.

Learning how to fine-tune AI outputs through more specific prompts has also been one of the most valuable parts of this experience. It’s fascinating how small adjustments can shift the tone and style of a piece while keeping the content consistent. For instance, during the job posting assignment, I realized I could promote the same position across vastly different platforms—from LinkedIn to Craigslist—by adapting the tone to fit each audience and I’d probably reach qualified applicants on all of them. That assignment showed how beneficial AI can be when guided by deliberate, well-structured prompts.

Looking forward, I can see how this skill will translate directly into professional writing tasks. Using AI thoughtfully can help tailor proposals for different organizations, adjust grant language for varying audiences, or revise company websites to better reach their targeted demographics. Instead of replacing the writer, AI enables the writer to adapt quickly and effectively.

For new students entering this class, I’d start with this: leave your preconceived notions about AI at the door. The most valuable lesson isn’t simply about learning how to use the tool—it’s about understanding how tone of voice shapes audience perception and how AI can assist in achieving this. When used intentionally, AI doesn’t diminish the writer’s role; it sharpens it.

Ultimately, this course strengthened my awareness of how tone of voice affects reader engagement, and it emphasized the value of the speed and adaptability that AI brings to the table.   Using AI as a tool to refine my writing is no longer taboo for me – as a matter of fact, it’s now a valued tool that I look forward to exploring more in the future.

Alan Turing and John McCarthy are generally known for their innovative work that laid the foundation for AI as we know it today, but I was surprised to learn that the humble spell check, invented by Ralph Gorin in 1971, was one of the first AI tools to have widespread use. That same spell check that saves us from embarrassing typos has led to captivating dialogue about AI personalities like Anthropic’s Claude, the ethics of AI use, and even fictional works like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Battlestar Galactica that challenge ideas of where AI is headed.

This week’s material is fascinating, and it has really opened my eyes to how AI can be used in a responsible way. There’s so much debate right now about how much AI use is too much AI use, and it’s a conversation that comes up a lot for me. As a visual artist, the use of AI to create art is a hot topic. At a recent convention, a vendor was escorted out of the convention center because they were selling AI generated art. It wasn’t clear as to what the convention used as criteria to determine that her art wasn’t compliant, but it brings up some questions. At the heart of those questions is when AI is considered a tool and when it’s considered piracy. The peer review assignments that required us to refine our prompts for ChatGPT were extremely helpful in answering that question. They helped to define the difference between the original writing and how ChatGPT could be used as a tool to improve upon the original work, especially in relation to how ChatGPT can offer tone adjustments.

Knowing where the limits are for ethical AI use is important in any field, but especially in technical writing and content creation. We touched on AI use in grant and proposal writing back in TECM 5170, but not as deeply as we did this week. I’m excited to apply this knowledge to future assignments and proposals.

The same ethical questions come up in visual art. The collage on this page, for instance, uses four different images and a Photoshop filter, and the bottom layer is AI-generated. Our use of AI tools in technical writing leads me to believe that the answer to “Is it still my art?” is a definite yes.

One the most surprising and significant takeaways from this week’s materials was what Dr. Kim said in her lecture “there is no single correct writing style”. Of course, that makes sense because writing styles are going to be different depending on things like the audience and the context. In the discussion of linguistic dialects, there was an example of how a teenaged relative may communicate differently on the phone than they do while texting is a social dialect called style shifting. Code-switching is a similar phrase that people of color use when talking about how they sometimes adapt their language and speech patterns when speaking to people from outside of their own culture to assimilate in the moment.

These examples of dialects seem more straightforward to me than the way I try to find my style for things like the assigned recommendation report. There’s a feeling that I should use a style with words and phrases that are more complex because that is more “professional”. I use the quotation marks because there’s no single correct professional style either. When considering the style for my assignment, I considered that this is a report that is going to a busy professional and I wanted to use as much plain language and brevity as possible to get my point across. I’m not always sure though that that is what people think of when they consider what a professional style is.

Regarding my own career goals, I’d like to be able to fine tune what “professional” means in each context that I need to use it. In my current position, I don’t struggle with this distinction as often; I am surrounded by PhDs, but no one is expecting a thesis from me when I’m trying to explain how to do expense reports in Concur. As a matter of fact, sometimes brilliant engineers need a lot more clarity when it comes to learning things that are far easier than investigating the principles of tribology or nanotechnology. In the context of a career in the corporate world, it’s a lot less clear to me how much technical language is too technical, and how much plain language is too plain. In that respect, it’s great to know that one size does not fit all, even if finding the right style for each situation means more work on my end.