GenAI: Author or Plagiarist?
Eddy Liulin
Instructor’s Introduction
In WR 120: Ethical AI and Creativity, students are invited to enter an evolving academic and public conversation about generative AI by developing arguments across multiple genres and media. The course asks students not only to analyze the ethical dimensions of AI in content creation and ask questions of authorship, originality, bias, and responsibility, but also to make deliberate rhetorical choices about how those arguments are communicated to specific audiences. Through a scaffolded process of drafting, peer review, and revision, while learning to use generative AI tools ethically, students produce argumentative essays alongside multimodal projects that remediate their ideas into new forms.
Eddy Liulin’s project exemplifies this transition from academic argument to rhetorical redesign. Building on a paper that argues for recognizing generative AI outputs as creative yet ethically entangled artifacts, Eddy remediates his work into an interactive webpage that invites users to actively participate in the argument. Rather than simply presenting claims, the site structures the experience as a sequence of decisions, asking viewers to respond to questions, make predictions, and reflect on their own assumptions before revealing key evidence and counterarguments. In doing so, Eddy preserves the intellectual rigor of his original essay while reimagining its delivery for an engaged, participatory audience.
Particularly notable is Eddy’s attention to process and tool use. His project reflects a transparent and iterative approach to working with generative AI: he authored detailed prompts, refined outputs, and made substantial manual adjustments to shape both the content and the design of the webpage. This aligns closely with the course’s emphasis on ethical AI use where we do not use AI as a shortcut, but as a collaborative tool that requires critical oversight, authorship, and accountability. His decision to move beyond platform constraints (e.g., shifting from Adobe Express to a custom-built interface) further demonstrates both technical initiative and rhetorical awareness of what the genre demanded.
Eddy’s work ultimately illustrates one of the central aims of the course: to help students see writing not as a fixed product, but as a flexible, adaptive practice shaped by audience, medium, and purpose. His interactive webpage extends his argument into a space where readers become participants, reinforcing the complexity of the ethical questions at stake while modeling a thoughtful and innovative approach to multimodal composition.
Pary Fassihi
From the Writer
As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) becomes increasingly integrated into our academic and daily lives, it is crucial for us to recognize the nature of authorship in its use. This project, designed as an interactive webpage developed with the assistance of GenAI, Google Gemini, explores the concept of creativity and the ethics of using GenAI in assisting our work. By using GenAI to assist me in producing this interactive webpage, I wanted to demonstrate how these models can serve as a valuable tool when used ethically, with appropriate precautions, transparency, and disclosure. The webpage discusses whether GenAI exhibits creativity and the ethical perspectives of using large language models in higher education. This project remediates an argument paper into an interactive medium that invites the audience to actively engage with it to explore the use of GenAI in an academic context and reflect on their own perspectives on creativity and ethical boundaries.
GenAI: Author or Plagiarist? (Website)
Chenyang (Eddy) Liulin is an international student from China studying in the BS/DPT program in Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. While pursuing his professional track in Physical Therapy, he is interested in emerging technologies involving generative artificial intelligence and consistently explores and experiments with the latest technologies in the field. He would like to express his thanks to his WR 120 professor, Pary Fassihi, for her invaluable feedback on his project and for encouraging him to submit this project to Deerfield; as well as to the Deerfield editorial committee for the opportunity to share his work and for providing an environment that encourages experimental and multimodal works.