Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI Using large language models to teach college- level essay writing Just as I wanted to write this book with GPT-4 despite having written previous books without it, Mintz immediately inte- grated the new tool into his decades-old teaching methods. Within months of ChatGPT becoming public, Mintz started requiring his seminar students to write their essays collabora- tively with the new tool. As homework, they bring the ChatGPT prompts they tried and the responses they received for class discussion. They must turn in their final papers with a log of changes to the machine’s output. As a great teacher, Mintz chose to use ChatGPT not as a source of answers and authority, nor as a replacement of his or his stu- dents’ work, but as a tool to help his students learn individu- ally and together. This appears to reflect Mintz’ conviction that humans can use all of our tools—including these latest compu- tational miracles—to elevate our distinctive capabilities. Mintz, in a column earlier this year, described ChatGPT as merely another in a series of recent technologies that have altered education: Much as Google devalued the steel-trap memory, elec- tronic calculators speeded up complex calculations, Wikipedia displaced the printed encyclopedia, and online databases diminished the importance of a vast physical library, so, too, platforms like ChatGPT will profoundly alter the most prized skills. This process of leaving laborious tasks to our machines—and using the time thus saved to take on new and difficult tasks 24