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AI Literacy in the Age of ChatGPT: A Guide for Instructors

Writing and AI Literacy

We have all learned how convincingly AI can produce hallucinated sources and false information. This can provide opportunities for students to demonstrate how to evaluate AI output and sources. 

Examples are directly from chapter 11, Writing with AI, from the book Bowen, J.A. & Watson, C.E. (2024). Teaching with AI: A Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. Johns Hopkins University Press.

  • Demonstrate how AI can produce an argument for anything and discuss repercussions
    • Prompt > Produce an academic sounding paragraph about why all novels should have a character named Barbie
  • Citation verification
    • Verify all of your citations. They must actually exist and say what AI says they say. You can use ChatPDF or Research Rabbit to verify page numbers
    • Your reference list should cite all of the original AI citations and your corrected versions
  • Fact Checking
    • Provide students with an AI generated essay on a topic you have covered in class and ask students to fact-check, verify references, and annotate the AI essay
  • Critique Comparison
    • Ask students to compare a primary source, a human written critique of that source, and an AI generated critique of the source
  • AI Summaries
    • Ask students to use AI to make summaries of a reading as preparation for class without revealing the topic for discussion
      • Use an AI to make three different summaries of X as preparation for class discussion. How might different types of summaries give you different information? Is there a difference between a summary of the science vs.the application?
  • AI Bias
    • Ask students to use AI to generate an argument (or an image) about an issue
      • What makes a police officer effective?
    • Ask students to discuss and/or write about potential gender/racial/power or other biases present in the text. 
  • Different Audiences
    • Use AI to create the same essay for three different audiences. Export the conversations and comment on what elements of styles, data, argument, and persuasion the AI changed. Write a reflection of whether AI did this well and why.
  • Sorting and Defining Quality
    • Have students ask AI to produce bad, average and good responses. Then export the conversation and comment on where and why each is good, average, or bad. Do this analysis yourself and then ask AI for an analysis of how the bad, average. and good differ. Is your analysis better? Create a rubric that delineates the components and qualities of each level. Does providing the AI with this rubric make the three examples more different? Create better models of each and use them to help the AI create better examples.