By
Abigail Chiu
   
9/9/25 10:29pm

Rice is bringing generative artificial intelligence into the creative writing world with this fall’s new course, “ENGL 306: AI Fictions.” Ian Schimmel, an associate teaching professor in the English and creative writing department, said he teaches the course to help students think critically about technology and consider the ways that AI models could be used in the creative processes of fiction writing.

The course is structured for any level of writer and also includes space to both incorporate and resist the influence of AI, according to its description. 

“In this class, we never sit down with ChatGPT and tell it to write us a story and that’s that,” Schimmel wrote in an email to the Thresher. “We don’t use it to speed up the artistic process, either. Instead, we think about how to incorporate it in ways that might expand our thinking.”

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Schimmel said he was stunned by the capabilities of ChatGPT when it was initially released in 2022, wondering if it truly possessed the ability to write. He said he found that the topic generated more questions than answers. 

The next logical step, for Schimmel, was to create a course centered on exploring the complexities of AI and fiction writing, with assigned readings ranging from New York Times opinion pieces critical of its usage to an AI-generated poetry collection.  

Schimmel said both students and faculty share concerns about how AI can help or harm academic progress and potentially cripple human creativity.

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“Classes that engage students with AI might be some of the best ways to learn about what these systems can and cannot do,” Schimmel wrote. “There are so many things that AI is terrible at and incapable of. Seeing that firsthand is empowering. Whenever it hallucinates, glitches or makes you frustrated, you suddenly remember: ‘Oh right — this is a machine. This is nothing like me.”

“Fear is intrinsic to anything that shakes industry like AI is doing,” Robert Gray, a Brown College senior, wrote in an email to the Thresher. “I am taking this class so that I can immerse myself in that fear and learn how to navigate these new industrial landscapes.”

The course approaches AI from a fluid perspective that evolves as the class reads and writes more with the technology, Schimmel said. Their answers to the complex ethical questions surrounding AI usage evolve with this.

“At its core, the technology is fundamentally unethical,” Schimmel wrote. “It was developed and enhanced, without permission, on copyrighted text and personal data and without regard for the environment. So in that failed historical context, the question becomes: what do we do now? Paradoxically, the best way for us to formulate and evidence arguments against this technology might be to get to know it on a deep and personal level.”

Generative AI is often criticized for its ethicality, such as the energy output and water demanded for its data centers to function or how the models are trained based on data sets of existing copyrighted works. 

Amazon and Google-backed Anthropic recently settled a class-action lawsuit with a group of U.S. authors who accused the company of using millions of pirated books to train its Claude chatbot to respond to human prompts.

With the assistance of AI, students will be able to attempt large-scale projects that typically would not be possible within a single semester, according to the course overview. AI will accelerate the writing process for drafting a book outline, and students can “collaborate” with AI to write the opening chapters of a novel for NaNoWriMo, a worldwide writing event held every November where participants would produce a 50,000-word first draft of a novel.

NaNoWriMo, short for National Novel Writing Month, announced its closing after more than 20 years in spring 2025. It received widespread press coverage for a statement released in 2024 that said condemnation of AI in writing “has classist and ableist undertones.” Many authors spoke out against the perceived endorsement of using generative AI for writing and the implication that disabled writers would require AI to produce work.

Each weekly class involves experimentation in dialogues and writing sessions with ChatGPT, with Schimmel and his students acknowledging the unknown and unexplored within AI and especially the visual and literary arts. Aspects of AI, from creative copyrights to excessive water usage to its accuracy as an editor, were discussed in one Friday session in the Wiess College classroom.

“We’re always better off when we pay attention to our attention. If there’s a topic (or tech) that creates worry, or upset, or raises difficult questions, then that’s a subject that we should pursue,” Schimmel wrote. “It’s in those undefined, sometimes uncomfortable places where we humans do our best, most important learning.”

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The platform ingests emails and shipping documents and uses AI agents to automate key processes across the order-to-delivery cycle, including anomaly detection, tariff classification, supplier mapping and audit readiness. Authentica says its system generates verifiable audit trails and retains human oversight while reducing compliance risk and maintaining operational speed.

“Geopolitics and AI are redefining supply chains,” said Michael Borg, founder and chief executive of Authentica. Industry trends show that AI is rapidly transitioning from experimentation to necessity in global trade operations.

Reuters reports that spending on generative AI for supply chains is expected to climb from about $2.7 billion today to $55 billion by 2029. The growth is being driven by tariff shifts, sanctions and supply disruptions, making automation and real-time intelligence essential even for firms that continue to rely on lean, just-in-time inventory models. Analysts say this acceleration reflects a broader pattern of companies investing in digital tools that allow them to maintain agility while responding to shifting regulations and rising customer expectations.

Many companies are already integrating AI to reduce risk and improve resilience. PYMNTS recently reported that retailers such as Target, Macy’s, Kohl’s and Amazon are applying AI to optimize inventory, with Target using AI-powered systems across nearly 40% of its product assortment.

Schneider Electric has also shifted from “just-in-time” to “just-in-case” logistics, deploying AI to detect vulnerabilities across its supplier base. These moves illustrate how firms are attempting to harden supply chains against unexpected shocks while gaining better visibility into their networks.

In this context, Authentica positions its platform as both a compliance safeguard and a financial enabler. By automating audit-ready compliance and delivering proof of shipment integrity, the company says its system can help lenders and insurers underwrite trade finance and cross-border coverage with higher confidence. For importers, this could mean lower costs of capital and stronger resilience in a tightening regulatory environment.

It’s been about a month since OpenAI unveiled its latest model, GPT-5. In that time, rival platforms have made bold moves of their own.

Perplexity, for instance, drew headlines with a $34.5 billion unsolicited bid for Alphabet‘s Google Chrome, while Anthropic — backed by both Alphabet and Amazon (AMZN 1.04%) — closed a $13 billion Series F funding round that propelled its valuation to an eye-popping $183 billion.

Since debuting its AI chatbot, Claude, in March 2023, Anthropic has experienced explosive growth. The company’s run-rate revenue surged from $1 billion at the start of this year to $5 billion by the end of August.

While these gains are a clear win for the venture capital firms that backed Anthropic early on, the company’s trajectory carries even greater strategic weight for Amazon.

Let’s explore how Amazon is integrating Anthropic into its broader artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem — and what this deepening alliance could mean for investors.

AWS + Anthropic: Amazon’s secret weapon in the AI arms race

Beyond its e-commerce dominance, Amazon’s largest business is its cloud computing arm — Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Much like Microsoft‘s integration of ChatGPT into its Azure platform, Amazon is positioning Anthropic’s Claude as a marquee offering within AWS. Through its Bedrock service, AWS customers can access a variety of large language models (LLMs) — with Claude being a prominent staple — to build and deploy generative AI applications.

In effect, Anthropic acts as both a differentiator and a distribution channel for AWS — giving enterprise customers the flexibility to test different models while keeping them within Amazon’s ecosystem. This expands AWS’s value proposition because it helps create stickiness in a fiercely intense cloud computing landscape.

Cutting Nvidia and AMD out of the loop

Another strategic benefit of Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic is the opportunity to accelerate adoption of its custom silicon, Trainium and Inferentia. These chips were specifically engineered to reduce dependence on Nvidia‘s GPUs and to lower the cost of both training and inferencing AI workloads.

The bet is that if Anthropic can successfully scale Claude on Trainium and Inferentia, it will serve as a proof point to the broader market that Amazon’s hardware offers a viable, cost-efficient alternative to premium GPUs from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices.

By steering more AI compute toward its in-house silicon, Amazon improves its unit economics — capturing more of the value chain and ultimately enhancing AWS’s profitability over time.

From Claude to cash flow

For investors, the central question is how Anthropic is translating into a tangible financial impact for Amazon. As the figures below illustrate, Amazon has not hesitated to deploy unprecedented sums into AI-related capital expenditures (capex) over the past few years. While this acceleration in spend has temporarily weighed on free cash flow, such investments are part of a deliberate long-term strategy rather than a short-term playbook.

AMZN Capital Expenditures (TTM) data by YCharts

Partnerships of this scale rarely yield immediate results. Working with Anthropic is not about incremental wins — it’s about laying the foundation for transformative outcomes.

In practice, Anthropic enhances AWS’s ability to secure long-term enterprise contracts — reinforcing Amazon’s position as an indispensable backbone of AI infrastructure. Once embedded, the switching costs for customers considering alternative models or rival cloud providers like Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform (GCP) become prohibitively high.

Over time, these dynamics should enable Amazon to capture a larger share of AI workloads and generate durable, high-margin recurring fees. As profitability scales alongside revenue growth, Amazon is well-positioned to experience meaningful valuation expansion relative to its peers — making the stock a compelling opportunity to buy and hold for long-term investors right now.