WN #13

AI in the Writing Process: From Foe to Friend

Is AI throwing a wrench into all of your writing assignments? 

While AI certainly presents new challenges to traditional ways of teaching writing, it also presents new opportunities. There are several innovative ways you can work WITH AI to help build writing skills. It just involves a slight shift in mindset, looking at AI as a tool rather than a hurdle.

While AI writing isn’t going to knock the socks off of an experienced writer, it does provide structured, fundamentally sound outputs. This makes it a good starting point, a solid base upon which students can explore nuances and tinker with refinements. It gives them a model to work with. Too often we expect our students to know what a good piece of writing looks like, when in reality some haven't had enough repeated exposure to have encoded in their minds what a satisfactory final product even is. 

With AI, not only can we produce a "base model" of a piece of writing on demand, but we can include students in the process. Work together to craft a prompt, or have students create their own, giving them a connection to the modeled writing they are about to work with. Once the writing sample has been created, let students critique it. Could it use more specific evidence? A more engaging hook? More figurative language? Could it be more concise? 

If you are dealing with a topic that your students have a deep understanding of, have them fact-check the writing. What does it get right? What does it get wrong? Where does it seem to have a misunderstanding, or bias? Students enjoy picking apart the AI-produced content and seeing the value in their own knowledge vs. that of AI ("beat the machine!"). It also provides students with great insight into AI’s capabilities and limitations. 

You can also edit the initial prompt to see how it affects the output. What if I change the intended audience? Or point of view? How does that affect the writing? Or have students use their critiques to design a new and improved prompt. How does the new prompt affect the output? Get a before and after model of what “including more figurative language” does to a piece of writing. 

These are just a few ways that you can turn AI from foe to friend in the writing process. This doesn't have to be the way you tackle every writing assignment, but it does provide a new angle from which to approach skill-building. You'll also find that alongside writing skills, you'll help build your students' and your own AI literacy as well. We must embrace the opportunity to blend old approaches with new ones, reshaping how we develop writing skills in a technologically advancing world.

Where Are We Headed?

You often hear that this current wave of generative AI tools is “just the beginning,” and it might have you wondering, “Where does it go from here?” Bill Gates shares his thoughts on where we are headed in the next few years, with a focus on the rise of personal AI agents. He also thinks a 3-day workweek may be on the horizon.

Avoiding “Data Colonialism”

Generative AI has been praised for its ability to democratize access to information, but university leaders in Africa are worried we could be headed towards a new era of “data colonialism” where foreign companies control the data that models are trained on, as well as the data that is collected when users interact with them. Building in-house models can help mitigate this risk, but few institutions currently possess the resources to make this happen, even in the U.S. That said, there are African companies making steps in the right direction, such as Kenya-based Kytabu, which creates AI-powered apps for Kenyan students and educators built and designed with localized content and context in mind.

The Need for Data Literacy

Speaking of data… we live in an increasingly data-driven world, but most of us don’t have a good understanding of when, why, and how data is being collected and used. The AI boom only adds urgency to the growing importance of teaching data literacy to students.

📌 Perplexity Pro Gets a Major Update

If you’ve read past issues of this newsletter, you know I’m a fan of Perplexity, a generative AI tool that cites its sources and doesn’t require any sort of sign-up to get started. Perplexity’s paid version (Perplexity Pro, $20/month) just announced some major updates, including the ability to switch between leading models such as GPT-4, Claude 2.1, and Google's new Gemini Pro, so you can find the one that works best for your task without having to switch between a bunch of different accounts. It also added the ability to upload and generate images, giving it similar capabilities to ChatGPT Plus.

📌 Gemini’s Awesome New Feature

Google’s much-hyped Gemini AI model is being released in stages, but we recently got a sneak peek at a cool new feature: the ability to dynamically adjust the UI (user interface) based on your conversation. Check out the demo video!

📌 ChatGPT Housekeeping

You can now declutter your chat history on the ChatGPT sidebar. If you scroll over any of your saved chats you’ll notice a new “Archive” button that will remove the conversation from the sidebar and place it in an archive that you can access from Settings.

Making ChatGPT Your Sub Plan Companion

I hate writing sub plans. I know what I want to do but I don’t want to write it all out. Now I can just verbalize my plans to ChatGPT and have it formalize them and identify/fill-in gaps.

More Ideas…

A high school English teacher shares how she’s been using AI in her classroom, including the 7 AI questions she wants her students to be able to answer (w/ associated activities).

A California district shares how to start an AI task force at your school.

• Generative AI can help you do your taxes this year. Intuit (TurboTax) and H&R Block have both announced new genAI features for the upcoming tax season.

• McDonald’s will be deploying generative AI at its restaurants this year, but don’t worry, they aren’t going full AI automation yet. If you want a fully automated, AI-powered burger joint, Pasadena, California’s new CaliExpress has you covered.

• The AI boom of 2023 has given us the Dictionary.com word of the year… Hallucinate!

• Alibaba Group has released a demo showing how we can use AI to try on clothes without having to try on clothes. You can test it out here, though for now you have to dress a preset model rather than being able to upload an image of yourself.

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