Historians Café

This assignment pretends you’re a fly on the wall of a café frequented by historians. You’ve overheard three different historians—possibly even from different time periods—arguing about some historian interpretation (how did Rome “fall”? What caused the civil war?

Objective

To use AI as a collaborative partner to produce the historians’ conversations.

Step 1: Warm up

We’ve already talked about Phaedrus in class, so you should understand what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. Even if you were in class, you should make sure you can understand the point. AI can help!

Prompt: I am reading Plato’s Phaedrus. Ask me three questions, one at a time, about what the point is. Use my answers to help me understand the broader point. Then, ask 3 questions one at a time to help me understand how to apply it to AI. What’s similar and what’s different?

Then, explore further with broader questions:

Prompt: Ask me three questions that can help me understand the kinds of pros and cons that have surfaced about writing, telegraph, radio, television, internet, in general over the centuries. Can your questions help me discover commonalities among these? Let’s focus just on communication in general and leave AI aside for now.

Prompt: Based on our conversation, ask me three questions about what perspectives or concerns might be included in a modern dialog about AI?

There are no “right” answers! Only questions, perspectives, suggestions, ideas.

Step 2: Assign roles

Now it’s time to create! As with the original, you need a few different characters in your dialog to represent different points of view. Aim for 3-5 characters. Less is boring, more is ususally more confusing than helpful (but it can be done well if they have very specific reoles to play). Write out what you want these to be, but don’t do anything with it yet.

For example—just for fun, do not use these exactly:

• The Freightened Academic: Argues that AI erodes human cognitive skill and creates “zombie” knowledge.
• The Techno-optimist: Argues that this is a spectacular new tool for expanding human reach.
• The Purist: Focuses on ideas of trust and piracy—how do we know what is “real” or “authored” anymore? Truth is dead.

Make sure you clearly describing what roles / perspectives your characters are meant to congribute or they all end up saying the same kinds of things.

You can also assign literary characters or pop culture figures to your roles so that the character imitates their “style”. CAREFUL: You still need to tell AI what view or ideas the character is meant to support in your dialogue though.

Step 3: Draft

Tell AI that you are creating a modern remix of Plato’s Phaedrus to represent concerns about AI as similar to concerns about writing. AI does better when it understands your overall aim. Paste in your role assignments you developed above.

Prompt: Following Phaedrus and Platonic dialogues in general, create a 1500-word conversation about AI based on the following roles:
[PASTE IN YOUR ROLE DEFINITIONS HERE]

Step 4: Revise and Iterate

• Once you have a complete draft, think about: where does it flow well? Where is it too hard to follow?
• Are the roles/positions that you defined clearly delineated?
  • How can you sharpen them, like: “Make the purist more interested in trust and traditional authoritative structures.
• Ask AI to reread your dialogue as a high school student and identify the key themes in your dialog. Yes it just created it, but it’s not like a real person who might be attached to it. It can “objectively” evaluate.
• Ask for ideas about perspectives that are relevant but missing. You have to decide if they are worth including or start to muddle the point
• What “bigger picture” questions does your dialogue raise about course topics?

Step 5: Refine

• Hopefully by now the characters now have a clear position to defend. But do they have a personality to match? How can you get AI to get a character to speak like it thinks?
• Is there a balance of the characters or do some dominate?
• Is there a natural flow to the argument? How can you make the whole thing easier to follow?
• Are the points that you want to make coming through? Do you think they will be apparent to your readers?
• How can you steer your dialog to the topics we’ve been discussing in class?
• Stylistically, can you work with AI to spice up the usually bland initial output without sacrificing clarity?

Step 6: Post

• Add your dialogue to the discussion board so others can see it and read it in class.
• Make sure the formatting comes through! It doesn’t need to be perfect, but if you have one giant parargraph that’s impossible to read, you get a ZERO for being a turd.