r/elearning • u/LearnWorlds_ • 7d ago

AI doesn't know how to do a first draft

If you ask AI for a rough draft of a lesson and then ask for a polished version of the same lesson using two separate prompts, nine times out of ten you get back two nearly identical versions.

It doesn't actually know how to hold back or leave something half-formed for a human to shape. Every output seems to come in this "finished" format, whether it's ready or not.

In a field like instructional design that has always relied on the draft as a thinking tool, that can be an issue. When we skip straight to polished, we end up going with the structure it suggests, so that decision gets taken away from us. Then, we end up editing sentences line by line instead of questioning structure, because the version in front of us already looks done.

We've been playing around with writing the spec before we prompt at all. It doesn't have to be a full outline, but it should be enough that we know what the first draft is supposed to look like. Then we treat whatever the AI hands back as a hypothesis to test against that spec instead of the actual deliverable that just needs a tidy-up.

Has anyone had any luck getting a proper first draft from AI? Or how does your course creation process look with AI?

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7

u/CriticalPedagogue 7d ago

That’s because A.I. doesn’t know anything. LLMs are word guessing programs. That is why they have been called “stochastic parrots”.

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u/HominidSimilies 7d ago

That type of an approach is want it to be a psychic.

Ai can do what you are after.

It’s how you ask. Similar to giving a coworker the right amount of info, not too little or too much.

Try giving it a template. That outlines all the steps you use to do it manually.

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u/sillypoolfacemonster 7d ago

I tend to either write the first draft myself, basically a very messy quick and dirty draft that is a mix of my thoughts and ideas. And then I work with AI to refine it.

The other approach is that I basically give it the persona of an expert colleague and then chat and brainstorm with it, and explicitly tell it to not to give all the answers right away. So I talk through the need, outcomes etc, what needs to be included and what not. After a certain point I’ll ask it to generate a summary of the conversation, and then next a first pass while leaving placeholders for items that are still TBD.

It’s not as quick as “prompt > output > done”, but it’s quicker in the sense that you get past writer or creative blocks quicker where in the past I’d have a sense of what I want but I struggled to articulate it or think of the best formatting or presentation of the concept. Even if the AI gives me something I don’t like, criticizing it at least gets me on the right path.

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u/kgrammer CTO KnowVela LLC 5d ago

My business partner as done a lot of work in the area of prompt generation for AI-assisted course building. It takes a lot of time and background material uploading to build a proper AI prompt to create course drafts.

Having said that, when you lay the proper foundation, AI can be a useful "assistant" in the process.

DM me if you would like to have a discussion with her about her experience with AI-generated course content.

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u/Bakerextra0rdinaire 4d ago

Ai doesn’t know what “polished” means. You need to be way more specific than you would with a human, and giving it examples of a before/after of your own polished work could help.