I’ve recently been a part of several conversations about AI-proof (or AI-resilient) assessments; these are the ones that apparently make it difficult to use AI in non-prescribed ways. I think this is misguided and will write something about it another time.
These conversations have led me to consider what other types of prompts we might consider helping students develop for themselves, where they need not worry about academic integrity, plagiarism, and university regulations about AI use.
And it led me to come up with a few examples of what I think of as non-academic prompts. These are the kinds of prompts that would help students support all the activities that surround learning, without any of the baggage that comes with using AI to support assessment tasks.
Here are a few examples that I’ve tested (the responses to these are really good but you’d probably need to use follow-up prompts to get more detail):
“I want to exercise more regularly but the weather is miserable which often causes me to skip exercising, and I can’t afford a gym membership. I would therefore like to exercise at home but my dorm room is very small so my options are limited. I don’t exercise often so I need a training programme aimed at someone with limited experience and relatively poor fitness. I also don’t have much time because I study and work as well. Create an exercise programme that I can complete in my 2×2 metre living room, using only body weight as resistance, that won’t take up much time.”
“I want to eat healthier meals but my schedule often means that I don’t have much time in the evenings to think about preparing my meals. So I tend to just eat whatever I have in the fridge, or whatever is quick to make. I’m also on a tight budget. I often have time on the weekend where I could prepare bigger meals that might last a couple of nights, but I’m not sure I know what to do. Also, I’m thinking of becoming a vegetarian but don’t have the mental space to think about new recipes, so I’d like you to include a few vegetable-only options. Prepare a meal preparation schedule that addresses these problems.”
“I’m not sleeping enough because I spend a long time on campus during the day – I have an early schedule – and work most evenings. I also play sport on the weekend, which takes a couple of hours. And I need to set aside time for studying. I find that I work late into the night on assignments, which means that I wake up tired and unable to concentrate. I can’t get out of this cycle. Do you have any suggestions for what I could try?”
“There’s a girl in my class who I really like, and want to ask her out. I think she might like me too but I’m nervous to ask. I don’t have many friends I feel comfortable talking to about this. Can you suggest a few approaches I could take to subtly find out if she’s interested in me?”
I was a bit hesitant to include the last prompt, as I’m not convinced that language models are the best options for relationship advice. However, for someone who is lonely and possibly socially awkward, they may be a reasonable option when there don’t seem to be any others. You can imagine a hundred other prompts that are similar to the ones in this list, each on unique and specific to the person writing the prompt. I’d love to get a list of lots and lots of student-generated examples of different prompts that they found useful.
A friend also pointed out that prompts like these may require a level of maturity and insight that some students may not have. Which is why I think we should probably share examples of lots of different kinds of prompts with students. I’d like to see more students – and colleagues – using more prompts for a much wider range of problems.
Not because generative AI is the perfect solution to our problems, but because we need to learn more about what they’re good at, and where they fail.