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For the past year, I’ve been encouraging my students to “invite AI to dinner.” I’m an English professor, but I think students in other fields could also benefit from extending dinner invitations to chat bots. One of my students joked about having dinner with a chat bot, “AI is spicing things up!”
Let me explain.
“Dinner With AI” is the humorous name I gave to a classroom assignment that aims to cultivate specific habits of mind and help students write better essays. Class exercises are easy. We discuss the text, in this case the essay “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson that the students read for homework.
I will provide some background about Emerson, share my experience with the essay, outline some of its historical context, mention what other writers and scholars have said about Emerson, and read it in class. Start the discussion by connecting it to other materials. This is pretty general content. Next, I divided the class into groups of 2-3 and asked each group to create some prompts about Emerson’s essay for the chat bot (I used ChatGPT 4o). You need to explain to students what a prompt means in the context of a large language model and how it differs from a traditional search engine query. Key difference: AI prompts start an open-ended conversation, while search terms ask for specific information. Once you have several prompts in each group, choose one prompt to write on the board. Here are seven prompts to consider. Here’s where it gets interesting. We will have a discussion as a class where we will encourage the AI to give a presentation. This part of the exercise is particularly fascinating because it requires you to discuss the most important thing to ask about Emerson’s essay and the best way to express it. Students often have weak initial prompts and need coaching. Students are striving to move beyond the search engine mindset. They tend to want answers right away, rather than formulating questions that lead to more thought-provoking and open-ended conversations. After you modify your prompts, vote for them to send to ChatGPT. In the case of Emerson’s essay, this prompt won the contest (after some tweaking during the discussion): “Help me better understand the relationship to Romanticism in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance.’ ” prompt contains a little more information, such as who the bot is talking to (I’m a literature student studying literary history) and that I’m interested in continuing the conversation. to the bot and then send the prompt. After 1 second, you will receive a response. Read the answers and discuss as a class. What are the most interesting responses from the AI? What did the chatbot miss? What did I miss? What direction should I go in with the next prompt? Should I approach it with agreement or criticism? The goal is to It’s about pushing the bot into new territory, challenging it to explore different directions, and making connections it hadn’t considered before, developing a direction and creating follow-up prompts through class discussion. Present to the bot. When the bot responds again, repeat the process by discussing the bot’s response and deciding on next steps. This interaction can continue for the rest of the class as well as future classes. Once out, I download the chatbot discussion and share it with my students. They then have a record of our discussion (all verbal interactions between students in the classroom). (Since I am not recording it, it is okay to record only half of it.) You can use this material to start writing your essay. What I want to emphasize is that their essays can come directly from discussions with ourselves and the chat bot. What position does your paper occupy in this field?
Now, let me explain why I think this exercise is valuable. Most importantly, it models habits of mind as a kind of conversation, not just academic writing.
My students, like most students (and probably most people), struggle with having good conversations. I don’t blame them because it’s very difficult to have a conversation. It requires more advanced skills: choosing a topic, understanding your relationship to the topic (do you agree or disagree with X or something else?), staying focused, and choosing the topic. considering the assumptions behind the response to others, ensuring the appropriate tone, gathering and evaluating evidence…the list goes on. These are the exact skills you need when writing an essay or engaging in intellectual inquiry, regardless of the field.
However, students rarely think of schoolwork as a conversation. They often think of knowledge as something given to them by teachers, textbooks, or now chatbots, or that they must somehow generate it from within themselves, through creativity or some mysterious ability called intelligence. I believe that it must be done. They often think they need to discover deep ideas hidden deep within Emerson’s essays, but this approach is rarely successful.
Instead, I encourage them to think of exploration as a conversation with another person. What are the other students in our classrooms, fellow students, professors, chatbots saying about Emerson? Most importantly, how do we respond to them? The knowledge I am trying to teach is developed by responding to others, including chat bots.
Although you can accomplish this goal without a chat bot, a bot makes the process a little easier. Exercises with chat bots help students develop good skills, such as identifying what is interesting, noticing what is missing, determining what will happen next, and thinking about how to respond. You are required to externalize the elements of the conversation. Additionally, they see immediate reactions to their decisions. This is educationally valuable.
I still have that old hope that one day my students won’t need a chat bot to have conversations about Emerson or anything else. However, in a world where large-scale language models can become a reality, there is a prevailing fear that students will stop thinking for themselves. However, we believe that this challenge will develop the skills needed to think with (and even against) chat bots, rather than making chat bots think.
There is much more to discuss, but I would like to close with a passage that I always share with my classes. This is a passage often cited by scholars of writing pedagogy who emphasize writing essays as conversations. This passage will make more sense to students who have completed the AI exercise. However, you probably won’t understand the sixth word in the first sentence, “parlor,” because you’ve never heard it before. So I changed it to “dinner party” and more recently “group chat.”
“Imagine you walk into a drawing room. You’re late. When you arrive, other people are far ahead, engaged in a heated discussion. So much so that you can’t stop and say exactly what’s going on. In fact, the discussion had already started long before any of them got there, so no one there could have ever done it on your behalf. all steps Listen for a while until you decide you understand the point of the argument. Then someone answers. You answer him. Another person comes to your defense. Another person takes a position against you…but the discussion goes on endlessly. It’s getting late and you have to leave. And with the discussion still going strong. , you leave.”
—Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941
The discussion could go on and on, but in conclusion, I would like to say that I felt it would be beneficial to invite a chat bot to a dinner party. There are countless ways to abuse this technology (I also discuss this with my students), but this approach has proven to be a productive use.
