Getting started with generative AI

A few basic ideas and prompts to start experimenting with language models.

At this point, it seems reasonable to assume that almost everyone has heard about the threat to assessment that’s posed by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and all the other language models that are becoming available. However, it’s less clear how they might impact the work of academics, especially with respect to teaching, research, and writing.

In this post, I’m going to give a few simple examples of how I use Claude, the generative AI from Anthropic, as part of an increasingly important part of my own practice. I use Claude to create summaries of documents, presentations, and lectures. For example, I ask it to create a 1000 word summary of my lectures and post those summaries to the learning management system for students. Or I summarise a conference presentation for my blog.

Examples of academic use-cases

• Writing: Improve clarity, concision, and grammar in my own writing. Create outlines or drafts of work that I know well (because I’m more confident of being able to spot errors).
• Research: Use conversational prompts to generate insights, lines of inquiry, ideas for research papers, and outlines of grant proposals.
• Literature reviews: Extract and summarise the key points from research papers and reports.
• Assessment: Generate a list of questions for quizzes and discussion in class, based on the material I provide.

Examples of simple prompts to get started

• “Here is an example of a piece of writing I’ve produced. Please summarise the document in one paragraph that I can use for an Introduction.” Or, the same as above, but ask Claude to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the writing, with suggestions for improvement.
• “Summarise the key ideas about online learning from the attached journal article in two paragraphs.”
• “Give me give ideas for a conference presentation that addresses both the benefits and ethics concerns of introducing new technologies in health and social care.”
• “Here is the text of a lecture I’m giving next week. Please give me a list of 10 questions I can share with students to help generate discussion on this topic.”

Read: Using conversational and structured AI prompts.

The best way to get started using generative AI is simply to start using it. All the advice in the world is less useful than spending a couple of hours experimenting with Claude, and pushing the boundaries to see what it’s good at, and where it fails.