Save 30% with code HTAI25 at press.jhu.edu.

Buy the Book at Amazon
Buy the Book at JHUP

AI Assignments

There are several chapters of assignments in Teaching with AI (especially in the new 2nd edition) and links to several great repositories of links on the resources page. New assignment ideas are added here with an additional set of resources below. Send me ideas and I will add them with attribution and links.

Fact-Checking Prompt Contest

Critical thinking is a process: Mick Caulfield calls this “critical doing.” In this assignment you will create a critical thinking process and create an AI bot that will assist you by helping you understand and verify facts and sources. 

  1. Contribute at least one claim to our shared document of test claims, like ”does Tylenol cause autism?” Controversial and political claims are useful here.
  2. Open a Word or Google doc and turn on track changes. Write a prompt that checks facts and sources. This is hard to do in less than 800 words! Test it against something you know is true (about yourself) that is verifiable on the web. Test your prompt against one of our controversial claims. Improve your prompt and explain (in the document comments) what you needed to do to make it better.
  3. In class: test prompts in pairs (using our shared claims document) and evaluate the responses together. Then compare your prompt’s response to Mike Caulfield’s Deep Background GPT. Read about Mike Caulfield’s SIFT Method for evaluating resources and misinformation and use this to revise your prompt. Retest in the next class.
  4. Read Mike Caulfields’s complete SIFT prompt: https://checkplease.neocities.org and compare it to yours (using both in Claude).
  5. Create a critical thinking process for yourself that uses an AI bot/prompt as part of this. Final Reflection: write an essay (or have a dialogue in the course reflection bot) about what you have learned and why verification is an important part of  critical thinking.

Variations

  1. Write a prompt that begins with “Help me discover if this statement/photo/fact is what I think it is? Ask me a series of questions (one at a time) to improve my critical thinking and help me verify if what I think are facts are true…”  Consider what criteria are needed to label something as true.
  2. Test a controversial claim with all of the following prompts (developed by Mike Caulfield) and compare the outputs. Pick the best prompt and make it better. Explain what you learned through this process.
    • Is this what people think it is?
    • What are some common misconceptions about this, and what are some settled facts?
    • Evaluate the evidence for the claim that _____ and provide a table that matches evidence to rebuttals and rates the strength of the evidence
    • Give me the background to this claim and the discourse on it that I need to understand its significance (and veracity).
    • Read the room: what do a variety of experts think about the claim? How does scientific, professional, popular, and media coverage break down and what does it tell us?
    • Use only Wikipedia as a source to analyze this claim, and then use those results to do wider research using high quality sources
  3. Write a critical thinking prompt that will help your critical thinking process. Start by listing the biases and assumptions that often lead you astray. Then build a check on them with this prompt.
  4. You and AI have different strengths. Reflect on where AI might help your thinking and where it still needs guidance from you.
  5. Write a prompt that will help you develop deeper and clearer arguments in your essays for this class.

Journaling with a Bot

Ask Insightful Questions to a Literary Figure

Michele Kassorla gives her first year students this prompt: You are the ancient character of Gilgamesh from the Epic of Gilgamesh. You will answer questions as Gilgamesh for this chat. Stay true to the story as you answer and then asks them to write a short reflection on why you asked that questions and what you learned. Read the details here and yes she defines insightful.

Make Me Explain

Ask students to explain a concept to an AI with either a custom bot or the prompt: You are an eager but confused student. Ask me to explain a concept to you and then ask clarifying questions, but do NOT correct me if I make a mistake. I will determine the initial topic.

What Am I Missing?

Ask students to create a sketch, build a chart, write an essay or just do a brain dump and then ask some version of What am I missing? What evidence is missing? How could I deepen my understanding/explanation?

Clarifying Terms

Ask students to have a discussion with a bot to help them clarify what they mean about a difficult term like “harm” or “equity.” Give them some version of this prompt: “Start by asking me to make an argument using a term with contested meaning. Your role is to be an experienced but kind professor of rhetoric and humanities. Ask me to define a term. Then relentlessly interrogate my definition and ask for more clarity and consistency. Is my definition defensible or circular? Are there implications I have not yet considered? Question my biases and assumptions. Generate counter examples. Help me think more deeply about the meaning and implications of my definition.

Logical Extreme

Ask students to have a discussion with a bot to understand the limits of having absolute principles. Give them some version of this prompt: “Start by asking me to state a principle. Then help me investigate the boundaries of the idea by pushing the principle to its logical limit. What happens if we follow this idea to its logical conclusion? Generate cases where my principle might apply, but I might not want it too. Include challenging implications. Help me see nuance and the danger of applying principles too broadly to all situations.”

Intellectual Framework

Too often we believe that disagreements are about a lack of data, but sometimes opposing arguments might just have incompatible intellectual frameworks. Try to uncover how this works by discussing common arguments using this prompt. “Start by asking me for a common argument I make or a disagreement I encounter with friends or in the media. Then help me uncover the underlying assumptions. I want to understand how sometimes opposing arguments might just have incompatible intellectual frameworks. Approach my topic from a variety of intellectual traditions using radically different frameworks for understanding the world (at least 3 at a time). Challenge me to reexamine the argument from these different frameworks. What assumptions does each make? What principles does each value? Examples of frameworks might be continental philosophy, classical liberalism, free market capitalist, critical race theory or the various religious frameworks. Do not be limited by this list. Choose frameworks that will be useful and show me different useful ways of thinking about the problem and make sure to include non-Western ideas.

Analogies

Use this prompt to improve your understanding of concept X: You are a supportive but rigorous college professor of A. Start by asking me for a useful analogy for X. Then respond by noting how my analogy is similar and different to concept X. Help me understand how analogies can illuminate or disguise by testing my analogy for clarity, relevance and usefulness. How does it support learning and understanding and how might it disrupt understanding? If my analogy suggests I do not really grasp the initial concept, explain what I am missing. Help me make my analogy better. tAsk me (one at a time) a series of probing questions to mine for deeper understanding.”

Build a Model – Test an Idea

AI ASSIGNMENT RESOURCES