TTT 2.08.23 Getting AI to give our students more HELPFUL, HONEST, & HARMLESS responses to their work
Channel: Paul Allison
Date: 09/02/2023

See: Creating an AI prompt for counter-arguments that are helpful, honest, and harmless
https://www.youthvoices.live/docs/creating-a-template-for-counter-arguments/

Directions for using this guide: AI Does Lenses https://www.youthvoices.live/aipossibilities/aidoeslenses/

Why do this?
This guide is organized with colorful tabs above and below where you are right now on this page. Open and close these tabs to learn about two complementary toolkits that can take your reading to the next level: 

10 literary theories that critics use to do scholarly research and debate 
10 “pre-set directions” or prompts that can cause a language generator to adopt the viewpoint of any literary theory when producing comments about any text you provide.
You will learn more about literary theories and how they help you understand literature, and you will see how generative AI can be employed to act like a partner in your study of literature, poetry, and nonfiction texts—both published works and those created by you and your peers.

Use this like a playscript
Treat this hypertext simulation—displayed as tabs that open and close—as a script for a drama that groups of teachers or students could read together. Take the roles of ten scholars of literary theory, each representing a different perspective. Another member of your group could take the role of the writer and begin by reading the texts in the center. The eleven of you have gathered together to respond to two poems: Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms” (above) and a  poem titled simply “Me” by Ismael, a high school student (below). Each literary  critic in this play has been asked to give 3 possible responses shaped by their scholarly research and debates (top tabs). In addition, they have been asked to provide a brief description of their literary theories (lower tabs). 

AI generated the scholars’ speeches
We generated the content of the responses you will be reading (in the top boxes) by giving a text generator (GPT-3 LLM) 10 “pre-set directions” (or prompts) that we created by re-mixing Deborah Appleman’s descriptions of literary theories in her book, Critical Encounters in Secondary English: Teaching Literary Theory to Adolescents. We used the OpenAI Playground (ChatGPT’s older sibling). For each poem, “Mushrooms” and “Me,” we introduced the 10 prompts, one at a time, then we pasted in the poem, and hit the Generate button. Fifteen seconds later, because we asked for 3 possible responses in the prompt, the results appeared with three reasonably cogent possible interpretations of the poem, each of them providing assertions, examples, and analytical moves that matched the literary theory we had submitted. We copied each of these responses and pasted them into the boxes under the top tabs so that you can see them together and, we hope, read them aloud as if in a play.

You can do this too
Our whole purpose in creating this guide is to show you what is in the two toolkits (10 literary theories and 10 “pre-set directions”) and to demonstrate how you can use these tools to power up your critical analysis of fiction and nonfiction texts that you are reading and writing. See the last section on this page for a step-by-step How To for using the AI Mojo Lit & Poetry Templates 01 – 10.

Do a readthrough
The 10 scholars and the writers—characters in this drama about literary theories and two poems—are anxious to get started! They have each been given just 5 minutes to respond to each poem. Our goal is to examine one poem at a time by hearing all 10 of their perspectives right next to each other, within an hour. Deborah Appleman suggests that “applying different lenses to the same text can reveal new features of that text.” Let’s see what gets revealed in this readthrough together.