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Santa Clara UniversityUniversity Library

Libarian Instruction Professional Development

This guide documents and supports librarian teaching. It includes materials from teaching retreats from 2018 onwards.

Humanities AI Chatbot Lesson Plan

This lesson plan provides a platform from which students can investigate the ways human-written and AI-written poetry can complement and contradict each other. It begins by prompting Google's Bard to write poetry and ends with a discussion of a poem written by J. Estanislao Lopez that references a poem written by a chatbot.

Learning Outcomes:

  • Articulate prompts that will solicit AI-generated poetry in specific forms and styles of poetry
  • Identify the unique attributes of poetry written and read aloud by a human

Materials:

Lesson Plan

1. Introduce the idea of using Bard or ChatGPT to write poetry, or reference an earlier discussion of it, touching on other basics of using chat bots, like telling it who it is and giving it specific intructions

2. Conduct in-class experiment of live prompting Bard to write a poem with the following central image. The significance of this image will become evident later on when you introduce the poem at the center of the lesson plan.

where starlings wander from their murmuration
into the denim-thick clouds of a storm
3. Try a variety of prompts, directions, and in-puts. Read the poems written by Bard aloud to the class to get response and discussion (laughter, disdain, curiosity, etc). Use student input to further discuss a series of prompts with Bard. Prompt it from the perspective of a specific type of person/famous person, and prompt it by telling it what type of format of a poem to write. Try out the "other versions" option several times to see how the poem changes. Start a new Bard chat to start a new line of questioning for the AI regarding writing a new poem. Here is one chat with a series of prompts, for example:
  • You are a lapsed poet who now works a 9-5 job and you are going to write poem using this: where starlings wander from their murmuration into the denim-thick clouds of a storm
  • That's too formal. Make it an experimental poem.
  • You are a classically trained poet, writing and publishing for 50 years. Write a free verse poem with no stanza breaks
  • Do that but use the quote of where starlings wander from their murmuration into the denim-thick clouds of a storm

4. Once you have had a sufficient discussion, move onto the real poem. Play the audio recording of "Poem with Human Intelligence" By J. Estanislao Lopez (link to audio on Poetry website) while students follow along with the text projected on the screen (link to poem on Poetry website). Tell the class: now we have had a chatbot write the poem referred to in this poem!

5. Engage in discussion about the differences between the two (points can be made about human emotion vs the lack of the AI and gets to questions of what the human experience is and means) and how one might better use Bard to prompt a poem more similar to Lopez's.

6. Having identified a core difference between the two outputs of human and AI, invite the students to consider how using AI may take away the humanity of their own writing and how they might head that off. What is at stake when their own humanness does not come through in their writing? A point may be made about poets and other writers using the process of the writing to sort through difficult emotions, make decisions, and organize their thoughts.

7. (Optional) Follow-up assignment where students try the same thing on their own with a different poem. You may require them to query the AI in a defined set of steps and record those steps, require them to furnish the best poem they believe they had the AI write, and request a reflection on the process.