How was AI Used in the Writing of This Book?

With the context of the book being about the incorporation of AI, further experimentation was also entertained in the writing of the content. The specifics of how AI assisted with the writing of this text is outlined below.

Brainstorming

After creating an initial outline for the book, I entered my outline into ChatGPT and asked whether there were gaps or topics that I may be overlooking. After reviewing the feedback, I revised the outline. I then occasionally consulted the AI regarding the order of chapters and other revisions.

Reformatting

I have personally written a lot of content for my composition courses and have also made many videos. For most topics in the book, I gave the formerly written content as well as video transcripts (generated by Microsoft Word Online Transcribe feature) to the AI and instructed it to reformat the content for an OER textbook and to preserve my own authentic voice. The key word “authentic voice” seemed to be very helpful in ensuring that my own explanations and phrasings were preserved. Areas where I addressed my class directly were removed, subheadings were provided, and other cleanup was given. Each chapter was fully reviewed and revised before being inserted in the text. I often told the AI what changed I made to what if had produced as a way of teaching the AI what I wanted. This seemed to be helpful in generating best responses the more I worked with it. It is important to note that all interactions for this text took place in a single chat. I always returned to and continued in the same chat so that it had full context and the benefit of me directly teaching it what I wanted.

AI Enhanced Activities

I had already produced some of the AI activities and tested them with students in former courses, but some were overly complicated and all were in a different format than what I was using for this book. Similar to what I did with the chapter content, I entered the pre-written activities, sometimes with revision notes, and asked it to reformat to match the style of the rest of the book. I then began to create new activities so that each chapter had an accompanying activity. For some, I already knew what I wanted, in which case, I would write the instructions without the help of AI but would still ask AI to proofread and format them. For some topics, I did not already have ideas. For these, I would ask the AI for ideas. I usually did not like the first several suggestions, but to teach the AI what I was looking for, I would explain to it what I did not like about each suggestion. Often none of its suggestions were used, but they contributed to giving me an idea that I did like. In those cases, I wrote out the activity idea and asked for assistance in developing it further, including sample prompts and to provide formatting consistent with other activities.

Reading Questions

After all the content and activities were completed, I wanted to add reading questions that instructors could use when assigning the chapters. I wanted a variety of questions, and instructed the AI to produce a question that represented each level of Bloom’s Taxonomy. This interaction required extensive instruction for the AI to fully understand what I wanted. In addition to extensive details in the initial prompt, I corrected its misunderstandings about the correct order of levels and what kinds of questions should would apply to each level. For the first 8 to 10 chapters I provided extensive revisions to help the AI learn what I wanted. The level it struggled with most was synthesis. However, in many instances, it would ask something about what it meant to use synthesis, so I left those, but others were far from what I wanted. Eventually it became better at this, but even by the end, I was still frequently revising the questions in the synthesis category. All questions were always reviewed, and many were revised based on what I felt was most important to understand from the chapter as opposed to what it had selected to assess.

Discussion Options

At the present time, only a few of the assignments have been reformatted as discussions, but I hope to eventually include more discussion options. AI has been valuable in collaboration for redesigning AI enhanced activities as discussions; however, this redesign has required more guidance than anticipated. The AI has struggled to retain much of the information that would still be necessary, and it seems to struggle with how to include a second person in the interactions with itself. I have generally had it make a few variations until I have a clearer idea of something that could work. Then I provide very detailed and explicit instructions to the AI about what I want to be accomplished in the discussion. It is still helpful to collaborate with the AI as it helps generate prompts for itself and sometimes inserts additional helpful tips.