Critical analysis of the Borgesian story

Using AI as a soundboard or critical friend

In this essay I have used three different AI apps to analyse a piece of my writing, and to make suggestions for improvement. Useful? What do you think?

Introduction

Like many people I have been experimenting with using AI in my writing — not, I wish to make clear, for the writing itself.

For example, I asked it to create a couple of schemes of work, one for a course I was running and one for a course I was on. With a bit of tweaking of the prompt used, in each case it produced something not too dissimilar to the ones I and the course tutor had already written.

In the blogging course I teach each year, the students and I have experimented with using AI to create what are called ‘personas’. These are descriptions of people who represent your intended readership. We came to the conclusion that while the results were not perfect, they provided some ‘starters for 10’ so to speak. I in particular was impressed by the fact that whereas I took half an hour to come up with one persona, ChatGPT took twenty seconds to come up with three.

I’ve also experimented with asking AI to ‘read’ a page from a report and then make a list of recommendations based on it. I wasn’t too impressed to be honest. The report said that girls are under-represented in Computing courses at school. The corresponding recommendation was ‘Have a greater gender balance’. Well, blow me down, I’d never have thought of that. It reminded me of a particularly nasty manager who had a go at me because I made a mistake while working at a cr*p job as a student. “Get it right!”, he shouted. It was on the tip of my tongue to say, “Now you tell me!”. I mean honestly, if I’d known how to “get it right” I’d have done so in the first place. Give me strength.

Incidentally, many of us predicted, before the curriculum in England was changed in 2014, that the proposed changes would almost certainly result in girls abandoning the subject. I even illustrated my prediction as follows:

Come back! Drawing by Terry Freedman

So, that was a disappointing result from AI but heartwarming too because it was good to learn that it didn’t know or understand the background, history or context as well as a human being does.

Anyway, back to using AI in writing. I thought I’d use it to provide some literary criticism on the Borgesian story I wrote recently. I put the same prompts to three different AI apps. Here are the results.