Lord of the Bots: AI and the Writing Process

A pretty common teacher fear regarding generative AI is that students will simply plug essay prompts into something like ChatGPT and plagiarize the results, short circuiting learning and thinking. But what if AI could be used to enhance the writing process rather than ending it?

When my LA 9 students were getting ready to write their summative essays for Lord of the Flies, I explicitly taught some do’s and don’t’s about using AI and writing and also created “bots” to represent the major characters in the novel. During the essay process, students dialogued with the character bots to sort out their ideas, to think about literary themes, and to locate concrete details for their writing.

A “bot” is a generative AI with a character or a personality that is specific to your task.

How to Make a Bot
TLDR? You can watch my video on making bots here instead of reading.

 

There are several free tools for making bots, but I used poe.com. After making an account with Poe, the basic process is as follows:

1. Hit "create a bot"
2. Give your bot a picture and a name.
3. Write a “prompt” to tell your bot how to behave. These are brief instructions, written as standard, conversational English where you tell the bot what kind of character it is, what it’s purpose is, and the kinds of responses you want it to give. Click here to see the prompt I provided to make a bot that acted like the character Jack in Lord of the Flies.
4. Add a “knowledge base” for your bot. These are documents that the bot will use, cite, and refer to during responses. For example, I provided a PDF of the text of Lord of the Flies to my bot so it could access the text.
5. There are advanced features you can try such as making your bot’s responses more or less creative, having your bot cite or not cite its sources for students to see, etc.
6. Give your bot a brief public profile so people accessing it know what it is and make it publicly accessible.
7. Publish your bot.
8. Test out some chats. See if it’s giving you responses that you like. If not, go back and tweak the prompt and knowledge base until it’s performing as you want it to perform.
9. Use the “share” button () to copy a link that you can share with students and off you go!

Student Tips for Using Any Generative AI

• TLDR: Here’s the tip sheet that I gave to students on AI as we began our essay.
• It’s really important to explicitly show students new technology tools like AI and to teach them responsible ways to use these tools. These tools are free and out there and accessible. Students are going to use them. We need to show them how.
• My basic rule of thumb is that plagiarism is still plagiarism. If you are directly copying-and-pasting material from AI into writing without attributing your source, that’s academically dishonest and plagiarizing material. That’s what we don’t want students to do.
• Instead, encourage them to use AI during outlining and planning and editing stages of writing. Dialoguing with an AI tool can help students sort through ideas, flesh out an outline, search out and consider evidence and concrete details, and refine their writing.
• One great tip, before a student integrates material from an AI chat into writing, is to flip to another tab and to try to recreate the information that they just got from the chat without looking at the original chat. This will help ensure that they are using their own words and understandings to write.
• It’s also really important to remind students - just as they would with a web site or any other resource - to check AI for accuracy. It does make mistakes!

Generative AI technology is really new and changing all the time. Bots can be a fun way to get students thinking about this technology without looking at it as simply a “writing generating machine” to do work for them.

If you have ideas about AI, want help using it, want to make a bot, or have a cool AI-related app you want to share with me, don’t hesitate to stop by room 2204 at the high school or to email me at mancoffd@svsd410.org