Advanced Nonfiction: Finding Your Voice in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

In this era of artificial intelligence (AI), it's possible to forget that there is no formula for good writing and that you can't tell a story with a bullet list.

Good personal narratives and fact-based storytelling are human endeavors, and they require a human perspective.

This course focuses on helping students to develop their own distinctive voices as they practice the kind of hybrid personal storytelling popular on Substack, in <i>The Cut</i>, and on programs like <i>The Moth</i> and <i>This American Life</i>.

Such voice-driven nonfiction writing combines first-person journalism techniques with descriptive narrative to build an audience, emphasizing a unique human perspective on the world.

Honest, authentically-voiced personal nonfiction is more endangered than ever because of AI, so we emphasize the ethical issues for human authorship that it raises, including the need for factual accuracy.

We also discuss the continuing challenges faced by nonfiction writers of all sorts as the technology keeps changing.

This course includes exercises with AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to help us dig into what makes the human voice human.