I was ‘testing’ Bing Chat AI yesterday, trying to see if it could produce a five paragraph murder mystery story in a compelling manner. I’ve got this inspiration after a discussion with a colleague of how ‘scary’ AI could be, of how it could write a story creatively, worthy of publication as a novel. Somehow it got me thinking of what differenciates human from machine. If creativity is the factor that separates us from machines, well, Chat AI is one of the things that may scare us as it can get very creative. In fact, many artists and writers already fear that it may eliminate their jobs, as it can produce art works/writing to the level of quality of experienced artists and writers.
Anyhow, as a teacher, I personally believe that AI is inevitable, and our students are of the digital generation. Instead of making AI as an enemy, I think we need to equip students with the abilities to employ AI to develop their learning skills. Something of a metacognitive approach to learning. It is due to the situation in which our students are located; they are a generation that has AI in almost every aspect of their daily life. Thus, they need to able to use it for their learning benefits.
And thus, back to my little experiment with Bing Chat AI. I specifically use this platform, as it provides not only the product of a prompt, but also references that it used to generate the product. In that way, I can always crosscheck the original source of the product, to see if the product is valid or true or reliable. I had an experience of asking a question to Bing Chat AI and it gave me a false information, but luckily it had a reference to the source and I quickly discovered why it provided me with the false answer. This feature is missing in ChatGPT and without criticality, one can assume that whatever ChatGPT provides, that is the truth (which is dangerous).
My first attempt with Bing Chat AI in producing a murder mystery story was a failed one. I started by setting the platform into “more creative” mode, instead of ‘more balanced’ or ‘more precise’ and typed my prompt. It immediately started typing a very compelling story, as you can read in the picture below:
However, when it finished, it deleted its response, and provided an answer which apologized for its inability and asked me to choose another topic.
Darn it, I was actually enjoying the story it generated.
But I was not going to be defeated by a Chat AI, so I decided to give it a go and used another method to coax it to generate a story. Therefore, I set it to another mode instead of ‘more creative’ one. I employed ‘more precise’ mode, and I was succesful this time. It gave me a response that it did not delete.
If you notice, the color of the site changed into blue, perhaps indicating the different mode it employed. Compared to the ‘more creative’ mode, the answer was lacking of flowery literary details (see the different adjectives it chose, for example), but it didn’t refuse to respond. It provided a more straightforward story.
I decided to choose the prompt that it gave me (in the form of a set of questions) and I managed to develop the story further, with more details. The prompt that I chose was ‘What is the name of the other man in the love triangle’. As I didn’t specify it in my original prompt, it offered to come up with a name.
I also tried to develop my own questions to the story. So instead of choosing its prompts, I wrote my own questions to generate the details even further. For instance, ‘How did Lady Singha kill her husband?’ and it successfully came up with a scenario.
And so on, and so forth, we chatted back and forth, and came up with a straightforward story, albeit it was no way in the form that is compelling and publishable as a novel.
However, this process has given me an idea of how to develop students’ writing skills without cheating using AI. If only Bing Chat AI had given me a ready made story that had been creatively very interesting and publishable, I would have been cheating the assignment of writing a murder mystery. If I had been a student, I would have simply given it a prompt with lots of details, and then after running it through the platform, I would have just copied and pasted the ready-made story it generated to a fresh document and submitted it to my teacher. Not a very good way to develop a writing skill, isn’t it?
So here is an idea for teachers to use the platform to develop students writing and critical skills, based on my experiment with it. Ask the students to follow the following steps:
1/ Write a prompt with lots of details of the story, e.g. the genre, the style of a famous writer, the names of the characters, the plot, the timeline, etc.
2/ Set the Bing Chat AI into ‘more precise’ mode and type the prompt into the platform.
3/ Respond to the initial-generated story either by choosing the questions it poses or by writing the questions themselves. Repeat when necessary until they feel it’s satisfactory or sufficient to generate a complete story.
4/ Copy and paste all of the conversation with the AI in a fresh document and arrange them as a story with logical connectors and in a chronological order. Save this document as AI-generated story.
5/ Write more details into the AI-generated story. Perhaps a conversation? A different adjective? More descriptions of how the characters look or think? More descriptions on the setting of places and time? Anything that make the story more interesting, like the ones published commercially. Save this document as a final story.
6/ Submit the prompt, the AI-generated story and the final story for assessment. In this way, you can assess the quality of their prompt, the way they formulate questions to the AI, and their creativity as well as their skills in making the writing more natural and interesting.
7/ For an additional assessment, you can also ask them to write a reflective note on the process, focusing on the weakness and the strength of AI in helping them to learn how to write, so this activity also addresses their criticality and their metacognitive learning aspects.
Done!
In a nutshell, this experience has made me realized that AI will not replace teachers any sooner. In a way, it is a machine, a tool, and like all tools when it is used with careful deliberation and clear objectives for learning, it may be useful and beneficial for our students. I hope this piece is helpful for your teaching!
Oh, do tell me how it goes with your students when you apply this lesson plan. I love to hear from you how the experiment work or not work.
Wandering Wondering Mind 