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AI Assignments

There are several chapters of assignments in Teaching with AI (especially in the new 2nd edition). 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

Build a Model – Test an Idea

AI ASSIGNMENT RESOURCES