By MARTY LEVINE
Playing in the “AI Sandbox,” a new hands-on workshop offered by the Faculty and Staff Development Program, demonstrated how to get AI to respond with a variety of solutions to basic writing tasks – and how to determine whether AI is actually useful to you.
The presenter, J. D. Wright (English faculty member and consultant to the University Center for Teaching and Learning), offered those in attendance a chance to practice creating suitable prompts, refining them to ask AI for different iterations of the desired document, and assessing whether the experience was helpful.
The longer the prompt, and the more detailed, the more complete and accurate the output, Wright said. “Inputs that go on for pages and pages, quite literally.... that gets you better and better results.
“Don't settle for the first output,” he added – a habit too often of students, he has observed. “They take for granted that it is the right answer, that there was no better answer to be gleaned. Have a conversation” with AI. “It works very much like a text exchange with a friend or a colleague.” Think of AI as a collaborator, Wright said.
Students in the class were asked to submit a prompt to Pitt’s Claude AI, or another AI of their choice, to create an invitation to an event in their department, along the lines of “Draft a social media post inviting people to a guest lecture about e-mail etiquette by Prof. Lessing at 10:00 am on Friday in the conference room.”
One participant volunteered that Claude “did exactly what I wanted it to do and made assumptions on its own that I don't disagree with” such as adding an introduction, leaving spaces for more details and providing a link to RSVP by a certain date. Another participant, who asked AI to make the invitation “fun,” was happy when “it made a really cute e-mail – with vivid colors.”
Yet another, who said his event involved “a contentious issue,” found that AI suggested a number of arguments that might arise when confronting this issue, adding “fall-back positions” for event organizers to consider.
Wright kept adding new suggestions to make the prompts more specific, such as telling Claude what tone was desired for the invitation or what attendees would be required to do in preparation for the event. Some participants appreciated the new tones AI produced, but found AI was also making assumptions that their prompt had not specified.
AI is not a correct answer machine, Wright emphasized. Rather, it is a tool for generating options. He recalled asking AI to come up with 100 titles for a paper he had written, “and it takes no more time to come up with 100 than it does to come up with five,” he said. Asking for 100 “increases the odds that it might stumble” upon the one you like, Wright pointed out. Indeed, most of the paper titles it produced were not suitable, but a few were quite good, he said.
Was your AI experience useful? Wright recommended asking: “Did this save you time or give you a better product then you would have come up with on your own?
“One of the coolest capabilities of AI is the capacity to be its own best user guide,” he said. “Ask Claude what you're overlooking. Ask Claude what next questions you should pose. Ask Claude to predict ways that your output could be misinterpreted or unintentionally give offense. Ask Claude for a recommended workflow for doing this task next time.”
AI users should also consider which tasks they would love to place upon the digital shoulders of AI and what tasks they enjoy and would prefer to do on their own. But even for the latter tasks, he said: “What parts of the task could Al streamline? How could Al enhance your enjoyment of the task?”
One participant said of her AI experiences to date: “I like it, but I don't always trust it. I don't know if it is saving me time," because she still needs to check its work.
“I rarely use AI to create a document,” Wright allowed. But he recommends that people don't hesitate to use AI to create a first draft “you can tinker with,” he said. Facing the blank page with anxiety? “I never have to deal with that.”
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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