The generative “AI” hype cycle has been at peak hype for the past month or so and it follows completely predictable tech patterns. Hypers tout all the amazing miraculous things that will be possible; doubters wonder aloud whether these things will fail to deliver on their utopian promises (because these things always fall short of their utopian promises), and most of the obvious consequences and outcomes get overlooked.

Inspired by and forked from kettle11's world builder prompt for ChatGPT, this is a bare bones adaptation to show how low can be the lift for creating “personalized AI”. This relies on the fundamental teacher hacks to expand conversation: 1. devil's advocacy and 2. give me more specifics.

Try it, adapt, and see what you think. (Full prompt below the break. Just paste into ChatGPT and go from there.)

Some notes at the bottom.

So much edtech marketing tries to sell the idea of “engagement”; I've written before about why I find that phrase so pernicious. While I'm still bothered by the way that selling “engagement” through technology makes it seem like what teachers do is inherently not engaging (e.g. “boring” lecture, plain old non-technologized classrooms), the more damaging part of buying into the marketer's story, that technology's goal is “engagement”, comes from the way such framing distracts from the more valuable — and undervalued — part of teaching and learning: reflection. I would put it starkly: knowledge and the act of knowing comes not from engagement but from reflection percolating and punctuated over time.