Chris Mayer
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
This lesson develops students’ awareness of the synergistic and disruptive potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in storytelling. Designed for a first-year writing class, the lesson explores the interplay between creativity and AI by examining LLMs’ storytelling capabilities. Students will collaboratively create a chain story, then use a LLM to generate a narrative based on their initial sentences. The class will critically analyze and compare human and AI-generated stories, discussing thematic depth, character development, and ethical considerations in creative writing. This activity encourages collaboration, critical thinking, and prompts discussion on the future of AI in creative fields. LLMs such as GPT-3 have demonstrated remarkable abilities in generating coherent and contextually relevant stories, sometimes rivaling human writers in quality (Xie et al.). These models leverage vast datasets and sophisticated algorithms to produce narratives that are considered by human raters to be both engaging and insightful (Xie et al.). GPT-4 and GPT-4o’s capabilities are even greater. The success of these models in natural language tasks underscores their potential in educational settings, where they can serve as tools to enhance creativity and critical analysis (Makridakis et al.). The collaborative aspect of this lesson, where students build stories together, aligns with research showing that group work enhances learning outcomes by fostering communication and teamwork skills (Brame and Biel). By engaging with AI-generated texts, students gain firsthand experience with cutting-edge technology, preparing them for future interactions in a world increasingly influenced by AI.