Hannes Bajohr (German), Ramona Naddaff (Art of Writing and Rhetoric), and Alexandra Saul Pascual (Spanish & Portuguese and Berkeley Center for New Media)
In the age of generative AI, writing is both under pressure and precious. If text can be automated at scale by machines, it also finds itself newly valued as a distinctly human craft and as a practice of thought beyond mechanization.
This course introduces students to the long debates about writing as a technology of communication and cognition, while engaging directly with the promises and perils of machine co-writing.
Through readings across philosophy, literature, media history, and computer science, as well as hands-on writing experiments with and against the machine, students will ask: Is writing process or product? What is lost and what is gained when machines write? What is writing’s relationship to technology—is it one itself? How do digital writing environments influence writing practices and products? And what can remain distinctively human about writing once its basic competence has been automated?
Students learn that writing may be more than just making a text: it is a way of thinking, of being in the world, it is a technology with its associated material infrastructure, and a human practice worth re-imagining in the age of language machines. As someone once said about thinking, the same can be said about writing: “A life without writing is not merely meaningless; it is not fully lived.”
Compass Courses offer you an opportunity to explore the division of Arts and Humanities. They are offered on different themes each year, but they share a unique structure: the class is taught by three professors in three modules of study.
You will have a chance to study with each professor, experience a range of approaches to the theme, and learn the methods and structures of different disciplines.
Compass Courses are designed to guide you through various options for study in Arts and Humanities and to serve as a gateway to the rich offerings at Berkeley. They are part of the freshman experience, advancing a common journey of discovery and building an intellectual cohort among students new to Berkeley’s expansive possibilities.
This team-taught course satisfies Philosophy & Values or Arts & Literature Breadth requirements.