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Reading the titles aloud

Have students read out the titles of the drafts they just handed in. When the AI-assisted ones turn out to be near-identical, the point about generic thinking makes itself.

Academic Practice & IntegrityLevel 1Complexity: BasicDuration: < 20 min

Recommended for: Any course where students propose their own topic for an essay or project

Background for the instructor

Telling students that AI produces generic ideas does not land, because to a student reading one output on their own, the idea looks fine. It only looks generic next to twenty others like it, and that is a view only the room has.

So give them the room's view. In the original run of this activity, students had been asked to have AI propose a topic; the titles that came back were "Navigating the Digital Age", "From Connection to Distraction", "Between Connection and Distraction". The instructor expected laughter. The class sat in silence instead, which is the more useful outcome: they had each rated their own topic as good.

Procedure

  1. In the previous session, ask students to settle on a topic or a title for an upcoming piece, and permit or require AI in doing so.
  2. At the start of the next session, ask five or six students to read only their title aloud, one after another, with no commentary in between.
  3. Let the silence sit before you say anything.
  4. Ask what they noticed. Then ask where in their own process the idea came from, and whose it was.
  5. Give them the chance to change their title before they start writing.

Discussion questions

  • Why do these ideas resemble each other?
  • You rated your own topic as good when you saw it alone. What changed when you heard it in a row with the others?
  • What would a title look like that only you could have written?

Extension options

A companion version from the same course: two students each read out two opening paragraphs, one written by them and one generated, and the class guesses which is which. This works better after the title activity than before it.

Reference

  • Piers Gelly, assistant professor of English, University of Virginia. "What Happened When I Tried to Replace Myself with ChatGPT in My English Classroom", Literary Hub, August 2025. lithub.com
  • Discussed by Annette Vee in the conversation on The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching at Perusall Exchange, 2026.

Also see