Ethan Mollick’s bestselling book “Co-Intelligence” has really been on my mind recently. You should read it. In many ways, I feel like the argument and narrative Ethan lays out in those pages is very in line with the thinking and work I have been carving out in my world over the past few years. The way Ethan describes coming to terms with the firmament shifting power of AI technology, the potential for folks to arise who are just really good at using AI and find themselves as a sought after group-a population who have certain, undefinable skills that allow them to ‘speak’ to these systems in certain ways to get results, collaborations with AI for better creativity, efficiency, critical thinking and communication. Even Ethan’s Midjourney epiphany is the summer of 2022 is something we both share.
I teach in the Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies Department at UNC Charlotte. I love this department. I love this work; it is filled with meta-cognitive approaches to the thinking about writing and the process of learning about the design of writing, the situational aspects of audience and author, the complex interplay between modalities, digital tools, accessibility studies, analogue and digital technologies, how writing and language change and adapt as they move into, through and beyond technologically mediated spaces and so much more. When Ethan Mollick writes about “a role for humans who are experts at working with AI in particular fields. We just haven’t quite pinpointed the specific skills or expertise that taps into the ability to ‘speak’ to the AI.”; I think we have. I think those skills and abilities are exactly what fields like Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies are concerned with; thinking about the complex interplay between writing (the words we use to convey ideas) rhetoric (the how and why behind those ideas and how those ideas impact audiences, even AI audiences) and digital studies (the technology that mediates those interactions). If anything, we WRDS faculty have been training students for decades in this area; preparing them to be eager and ready to collaborate and meta-cognitively engage with this Second Mind; to step outside their own thinking and reflect on the why and the how and to engage in that crucial process of learning through thinking.
I believe this is why I, as someone who has been doing this work for the last (nearly twenty? can’t be) years now, engaging with AI as this Second Mind or as Ethan Mollick puts it, as this alien Co-Intelligence feels so natural and intuitive; I am used to stepping outside of my own head a little and thinking about my own thinking, bouncing ideas around and having them reflected back at me.
Here is something I am working on for Spring 2025.
Interview with an AI
(adapted from Mike Kentz’ ‘Interview a Fictional Character’ activity found in the Harvard metaAIlab)
Practice the rhetorical strategies involved in conducting an interview in order to establish a set of skills, habits and protocols for collecting primary research for inquiry Podcasts projects, written compositions and other multimodal work in WRDS 1103.
Learning Objectives
Design AI prompt personae to foster the types of AI output needed.
Generate expertise effectively collaborating with MS Copilot to create effective AI input and output
Evaluate AI ‘interviewee’ responses
Outcomes
Develop rhetorical strategies for writing interview questions that lead to desired responses
Engage in dialogue with AI personae to practice conversing with interview subjects
Develop conversational and interview skills and rhetorical writing strategies for writing interview scripts and questions
Instructions
1). Construct three AI Personae Using MS Copilot.
Based on the Inquiry Research Topic students are exploring in WRDS 1103 projects, they will spend time developing three distinct AI Personae that will act as practice interviewees for this exercise. Students will craft these personae by thinking about the audience they might encounter in the work they are doing. For example; if they are researching the impact of social media technology on college age students, they might construct one Personae as the following:
AI Personae 1: You are a concerned parent of a Second-year college student at a major university. You have read multiple news articles about the impact of social media on younger, college age populations and you are worried about the negative impacts of these platforms on this population. You are also an avid user of platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Please respond to the following question with a concerned and sometimes slightly hostile tone.
Students will construct three such Personae. (Guidance will be provided here in order to ensure certain ethical boundaries are not crossed).
2). The Interview Process
Students will then conduct sample interviews with their AI created Personae, asking open-ended questions about their Inquiry Project topics. The goal here is not to seek primary source information but to practice the rhetorical strategies students will use later to seek primary research from real people. Remember: AI tends to make things up, hallucinate and its primary goal is to make you happy and give you what you want. Keep that in mind.
Developing strong, open-ended and rhetorically sound questions to move the interview in the direction you would like it to go is what you are practicing here. Students will spend time collaborating with the AI to figure out which questions work and which don’t. Developing these questions in collaboration with the AI is a major part of this assignment.
3). Evaluation
After students spend time conducting the interviews with the various Personae, they will evaluate the different questions they asked to figure out which ones worked best to get the answers they wanted and which ones led to deadends or answers that fell flat.
From this process, students will begin to develop rhetorical strategies that will guide their work in creating strong interview questions that they can then use to conduct engaging interviews to collect primary research data for Podcasts, essays, and other multimodal projects.
Students will also share the written transcriptions from the AI conversations as part of this work for discussion, analysis and assessment of critical thinking or other outcomes to encourage the idea that AI collaboration is always part of the process and not the final product.