Our guiding assumption is that every student enrolled in Humanities Core has something meaningful to contribute to our discussions of texts, artworks, and films and to our collaborative explorations of what it means to be human. Practicing what scholar Cate Denial calls a “pedagogy of kindness,” we believe students and we believe in students. This extension of trust welcomes students into our academic community, while the supportive structures we provide, through clear policies and assignment expectations, allow students to cultivate their curiosity in the fine details of form and context as well as the big questions posed by the study of the humanities. We ask questions of the works we study and ask questions of ourselves, in the evolving social and relational process that is learning.
Our seminar format, complemented by one-on-one conferences, means that teaching faculty get to know their individual students’ intellectual interests and burgeoning skills in college-level analysis, communication, and critical thinking. Our experienced teaching faculty do not use any automated assessments or run automated “detectors” on students’ written work. Instead, we engage in human conversations, both oral and written, that extend across the quarter and across the thematically unified year.
So what is the role of generative AI products in Humanities Core? Such products or added app functions are increasingly pervading the digital ecosystems in which we are embedded, sometimes forced on us without our consent. In Humanities Core, students learn when, how, and why they can choose not to use generative AI. They learn about the technology and connected social, environmental, and ethical issues so that they can recognize their own agency in their learning and become better equipped to make informed choices for future success. Most importantly, through trust and supportive teaching, students are given the space to read, write, research, and discuss without feeling any false need to outsource their learning activities to generative AI products. In the context of the Humanities Core classroom, we truly do not care what statistically-likely strings of text a generative AI chatbot can produce—after all, none of us really needs another essay repeating generalities about a novel. What we care about is what each student, from that student’s own perspective, can discover about a text by reading it closely and writing about it; that learning experience, rather than writing output, is what we emphasize and what we believe every student should have.
Foundational General Education and Critical Digital Literacy
Central to the UC Irvine General Education Requirement in Lower-Division Writing (1a) is the conviction that effective writing, research, and communication at the university are linked to critical reading and information literacy skills. The Humanities Core course sequence fulfills this foundational general education requirement and prepares students for active engagement in their undergraduate degree programs, professional careers, and public lives. Generative AI products are heavily marketed to high school and college students in an effort to make them captive lifetime consumers, and often in ways that discount students’ agency in their own learning and ability to value their own voice and ideas. We believe that critical digital literacy, now and for the future, includes equipping students with the knowledge and discernment necessary to assess the usefulness of tech products for particular tasks; evaluate privacy policies and product information rather than uncritically accept marketing language and synthetic text as truth; and make choices informed by awareness of the technical limitations and the educational, social, political, or ecological consequences of cultural technology products in the larger contexts of which we are a part.
How Generative AI Use Can Bypass Learning
Across the curriculum in Humanities Core, students learn that the writing process is also a thinking process; one figures out what one thinks by working through how to word it. We maintain, therefore, that the hype-driven marketing language promising that generative AI products are helpful for “brainstorming” college-level essay topics, for example, is misleading. In Humanities Core, we recognize that our students risk losing crucial opportunities to develop their own cognitive abilities and to formulate their own ideas if they offload their brainstorming to a chatbot. Companies also try to persuade college students that AI-powered products can evaluate the quality of their writing and automatically “improve” or “refine” it, but these claims are marketing ploys that prey on the insecurities of first-year students, including first-generation, multilingual, and neurodivergent learners, who may lack confidence in their writing skills. Our scaffolded writing assignments aim to help students develop those fundamental skills in community with their peers.
As students in Humanities Core begin to conduct their own research, culminating in a capstone spring project on a topic of their choosing, they practice using specialized academic databases and tracing scholarly conversations across peer-reviewed academic publications. The research process is thus also a learning process, and students who outsource the research process to generative AI products may miss out in developing the foundational skills that enable critical thinkers to discern fact from fiction, and expert research from AI slop. Generative AI chatbot products tend to restrict research queries to sources that are easily accessible online and happen to include words similar to the words the user inputs. As a result, they narrow the scope of the research, and prevent students from learning how to verify and evaluate sources themselves. Students using these products miss the research experience of discovering, sometimes serendipitously, scholarly sources that can open their minds to new ways of looking at a topic.
The banal generalities in chatbot responses are no replacement for carefully formulated interpretations; similarly, the superficial and potentially imaginary secondary source references that can be produced by some generative AI products don’t compare to the depth of exploration that we expect students in Humanities Core will undertake in their research projects. Likewise, the learning outcomes for the digital composition activities in this program (building a personal academic website for reflection) emphasize responsible online source attribution alongside the development of the writer’s own voice in reflective learning. And in-person essay exams in Humanities Core give students the opportunity to demonstrate how they interpret course topics and texts, as well as how they make connections across fields of study and synthesize their understanding of overarching themes in the course.
Guidelines for Humanities Core Students
As a student in Humanities Core, there is no academic reason for you to use an AI chatbot as part of your learning, writing, or research in this program. If you allow Grammarly, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini, Siri, or DeepSeek to change your writing (or if you rely exclusively on Google Translate, DeepL, or Doubao to translate readings or write essays), it not only may detract from your learning but may result in less effective writing because artificially-generated phrasing obscures your voice and your ideas—the very aspects that make your contributions meaningful and that this course aims to develop. A central component of what you are learning and being evaluated on in this course is the writing process, and the evolution of your ideas through the writing process thus needs to be apparent to you and your instructor. In learning how to brainstorm, engage with the ideas of other scholars, draft, receive instructor and peer feedback, and revise your writing, you’ll gain critical thinking skills that you would not acquire from merely copying a text generated for you by a generative AI product.
When gauging whether or not a generative AI product can be used in this course, ask yourself a few basic questions:
- Is the product in some way interrupting or preventing me from learning a specific skill or engaging in a part of the writing process? For example, if you are asked to paraphrase a passage of text in your own words, and you instead prompt ChatGPT to do so, then the product, rather than you, is demonstrating its capacity to select specific details of a text as evidence for an interpretive claim. Your HumCore seminar instructor isn’t trying to train ChatGPT to discern the difference between effective summarizing and paraphrasing; they are trying to help you develop those critical reading, thinking, and writing skills. You can always check the learning objectives for any assignment to make sure you are the one doing the work that is being assessed.
- Is the originality of my ideas or my voice in writing diminished or lost through the use of this product? If, for instance, you are asked to construct an effective topic sentence and therefore must make meaningful choices about the words you use and the organization of your grammar in assembling a claim, then you shouldn’t use a translator app to generate that sentence.
- Is use of this product permitted by my instructor? When in doubt, consult your seminar instructor about assignment guidelines, learning goals, and the appropriateness of using particular products in this course. All Humanities Core seminar instructors will provide specific policies and procedures regarding generative AI use and academic misconduct along with each quarter’s syllabus.
For information about the program’s Academic Integrity policies and procedures, please consult our Enrollment and Policies page and your seminar’s Policies and Procedures document.
Resources for Our Students
Beauchamp, Tamara. “Thinking About Your Writing in Humanities Core,” Humanities Core Handbook: Environment | Encounter | Entanglement 2026–2027, edited by Tamara Beauchamp, Macmillan Learning, 2026, pp. 31–46.
“Generative AI and Information Literacy,” UC Irvine Libraries Research Guides, 2026.
Herrmann, Amalia. “Critical Skills for Attending to Your Digital Entanglements,” Humanities Core Handbook: Environment | Encounter | Entanglement 2026–2027, edited by Tamara Beauchamp, Macmillan Learning, 2026, pp. 47–65.
Further Reading for Interested Students and Faculty
Alexander, Jonathan. “Students’ Right to Write,” Inside Higher Ed, 23 Nov. 2023.
Bacalja, Alexander, Earl Aquilera, and Edison Castrillón-Ángelet. “Critical Digital Literacy,” The Handbook of Critical Literacies, edited by Jessica Zacher Pandya et al., Routledge, 2021.
Foley, Alan, and Fasika Melese. “Disabling AI: Power, Exclusion, and Disability,” British Journal of Sociology of Education, June 2025, pp. 1–22.
Mitchell, Melanie. “Why AI Chatbots Lie to Us,” Science, vol. 389, no. 6758, July 2025, p. eaea3922.
Nelson, Alondra. “Platform Obscurantism: The Hidden Substrates of Machine Learning,” Limn, no. 13, June 2026.
Nichols, T. Philip, et al. “Speculative Capture: Literacy after Platformization,” Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 2, Apr. 2024, pp. 211–18.
Pangrazio, Luci. “The (Im)Possibility of AI Literacy,” Learning, Media and Technology, vol. 51, no. 1, Jan. 2026, pp. 1–7.
Tan, Mei, Lena Phalen, and Dorottya Demszky. “Marked Pedagogies: Examining Linguistic Biases in Personalized Automated Writing Feedback,” Proceedings of the LAK26: 16th International Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, 2026, pp. 568–77. ACM Digital Library.
Watters, Audrey. “Introduction,” Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, MIT Press, 2021.
Williamson, Ben, Felicitas Macgilchrist, and John Potter. “Knowledge Infrastructure Crisis: Digital Democratic Deficits and Alternative Designs for Education,” Oxford Review of Education, vol. 51, no. 6, Nov. 2025, pp. 936–52.
Notice
The University of California maintains clear policies on course material ownership and on distribution of course recordings. UC Irvine Humanities Core reserves all intellectual property rights to the lecture and writing curriculum, textbook, and assignment prompts of this program, and we expressly prohibit uploading course materials or recordings to chatbots as well as any use of these materials for generative AI training.
