Written By AI — Final Project

Link to my paper: https://go.iu.edu/4NSk

Reflection

I struggled to finish this project, as what I chose became much more than I could accomplish in the time given. The amount of work I estimated grew the more I worked on it. In the end, I have created a significant literature review of my topic, including my own thoughts about the topic, and included some embedded images. I admit that my perfectionism played a part in my difficulty as well, both in the written and video (Pecha Kucha) portions.

I have written and published in the area of communication, media and law. I know a few things about the challenges of researching law so you might say I should have known better. Almost every university law school of any size has a journal. Many publish both student and faculty work, of varying quality. Most student work is summative, covering precedent, tracing history, and examining particular decisions in detail. It is a good place to start if you are just learning about a legal topic, but it can be a lot to sift through to find the rare unique insight. Faculty articles are often voluminous. However, a careful read will often lead to the construction of a new viewpoint. In addition, reading original cases is required, and luckily the internet provides easy ways to do this. Government documents are also key, especially when the legal area overlaps with Congressional work, official bodies, and hearings. Finally, prominent professional lawyers and law firms often have blogs, and occasionally have some keen insight. Much of this reading requires specialized reading skills.

I assumed that since generative AI only recently became the center of the public eye, that there would be scant reading on AI as authors. This is true in the communication research journals. There are many mass-market books on AI in general, starting about 2019, but books are difficult to get through in a short amount of time, and, I did not find many titles specific to my topic. However, in the case of law, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand have been wresting with the AI authorship idea longer than the U.S., and, I found that every law journal seemed to have at least two articles on the topic, especially from 2019–2023. In fact, as I was researching, several additional items were published! I spent some time with news articles to narrow my legal search. Still, I had quite a lot of reading to do. I never quite reached saturation in that I was still gaining new insights and changing my own perspective daily.

This work is not yet thorough enough to be part of a published paper, but I intend to continue to pursue it until it is. When I began this project I did intend to use this work to launch a research element after the class is over for a journal submission, and that is still my plan. What that research will be I do not yet know, but it is likely to be data from a public survey or structured interviews with experts.

I intended to also produce a short video summarizing the written work. I did part of this, but as I mentioned, the end of my paper was still changing up until I had to turn it in. So this part of my class project will be taken up later this summer as I prepare for a fall upper-level class I teach called Human Communication and the Internet.