Artificial intelligence can bring literary characters to life, at least a little. Chatting with Faust, Mephisto, Gretchen: Zurich teacher Robin Fürst knows how it’s done.
The German teacher Robin Fürst has been working with digitalized elements in lessons for years. He says: “The potential of Chat-GPT is huge.”
Do you know what “role prompting” is? Robin Fürst, a German teacher at the Zurich Unterland Cantonal School in Bülach, knows it. In a “role prompting” you talk to Chat-GPT, the computer program that can write itself. More precisely: you ask the writing bot to play a figure from German literary history. How about, for example, Gretchen from Goethe’s “Faust”?
Fürst tried this out a few months ago and showed the chat history of his high school class. The first message to the bot was:
It is a sophisticated “prompt”. This is what commands, questions and input to Chat-GPT are called. This prompt is precise, clearly outlined, with context and information about the type of text you expect from the bot. Now the machine should know what to do. She is supposed to play Gretchen, a young woman who is seduced by Faust and impregnated, poisons her mother, kills her child, ends up in prison and is sentenced to death.
And so a lively dialogue develops between the teacher and Gretchen. But soon the person speaking on the screen starts chattering away. Prince wants to know how she fared in the dungeon. Chatbot Gretchen answers:
Hmm. Gretchen wants to be innocent? The child murderer? That makes you suspicious. There is no trace of the clarity of the female protagonist in Goethe – “I killed my mother / I drowned my child” – in the computerized answers. There is certainly nothing of the insight, humility and religiosity of the original from 1808.
Chat-GPT can also make up words when you ask the bot. The image shows an excerpt from an online presentation on the topic of “prompt engineering”.
But that doesn’t matter, on the contrary. The machine’s answers are intended to make people suspicious, to challenge people, and to set something in motion. Robin Fürst says: “Such role prompting has a double effect: the students learn to assess the quality of the chatbot’s answers. At the same time, they learn that they themselves know much more than Chat-GPT.”
Try it out and let it try out
Fürst, 42, is a prompt engineer from the very beginning. Teachers like him are passionate about new formats in the classroom. They simply try things out and then let their students experiment in the same way. One of his classes uses Chat-GPT to prepare for the “Youth Debates” debate competition. The German teacher has been working with digitalized elements in lessons for years. He is already an expert in playful approaches (“gamification” is what it is called in technical language). Now you turn to him if you want to know what you can do with Chat-GPT in school lessons. And above all, how. Fürst says: “The potential is huge.”
Is that really it?
Robin Fürst’s Gretchen chat at least suggests that classic and completely new forms of teaching can complement each other. And that students can learn something from dusty classics like “Faust” to help them find their way in the world of bots and artificial intelligence (AI).
Yes, you can even get to the really big questions: What makes us human? What distinguishes us from the machine, from a racing, flashing line on the screen?
“Try this!” Robin Fürst wants to inspire other teachers to use Chat-GPT.
Nonsense on the screen
Goethe’s Gretchen immediately recognizes the devil when he rises from the dungeon floor in the form of Mephistopheles. She doesn’t want to have anything to do with him – and therefore not with Faust, who got involved with Beelzebub: “Heinrich, I’m terrified of you!” Better to die, better to go to heaven: «Judgment of God! I gave myself up to you!”
Chatbot Gretchen, on the other hand, evades, makes herself a victim, wanders around and is suddenly no longer sure of herself. She’s talking out of her mind when Fürst writes back:
What crazy nonsense!
Are you still googling or are you already prompting? The most important terms for beginners, explained in a register by a professional.
The example shows: Chat-GPT can’t do it, at least not in the free version GPT-3.5, which Fürst used at the time. The bot can’t reflect, can’t build an argument, can’t connect anything. Nothing new that would stand up to (literary) critical consideration. Instead, as experts say, he “hallucinates” to himself. He rambles something about being saved. In the dungeon, Gretchen has long since finished with life and the world. “Day! Now it’s daytime! “The last day is coming!” she says in Goethe.
Rattling instead of thinking
Writing is thinking, reflecting, revising, refining the text. The chatbot does none of these things. He just rattles through his data (including the 4,614 verses of “Faust I” that he picked up somewhere on the Internet) and then quickly, quickly puts together an answer. Or, as the machine writes itself upon request:
Chatbot-Gretchen writes error-free, sober, in an interchangeable, automatic style. The style of the literary original has been lost, but that would be bearable. The core problem is that the machine has to make do without facts. No numbers are required, no lexical knowledge about the world. That would be its great strength; the bot knows this like no one else in any school class.
Not so with “role prompting”: This requires adaptability and creativity – qualities that go far beyond what a chatbot can come up with with all its data, statistics and probability calculations of “human-like texts”.
Write like Gretchen? This is where the machine must fail. Only geniuses can do that. High school graduates should actually notice this – provided they have read “Faust” and developed a feel for Goethe’s masterpiece. For example, you could keep a reading journal where you write down what you notice when you write back and forth with Gretchen, Faust or the lovesick Werther. Young people might ask themselves: Was the bot authentic? Why not)? How do you trick him?
This could be a cool experience. And of course it’s pretty cool that thanks to Chat-GPT you can talk to characters who otherwise only appear in Reclam booklets or e-books and can’t leave the corset of the literary source.
Even professionals like Robin Fürst only work selectively with artificial intelligence in lessons.
Robin Fürst didn’t let Gretchen’s chatter discourage him. The German teacher switched to the GPT-4 paid version – which costs just under 20 francs per month – and tried again. Now he assigned the bot the role of Fiesco from Schiller’s “The Conspiracy of Fiesco in Genoa”. The German teacher wanted to know from Fiesco: whether he was just playing with Julia, his opponent’s sister, or whether he had real feelings for her?
GPT-4 replied:
The truth serum trick
Now the bot hits the spot. «This flowery language, it’s great! Try this!” Fürst was thrilled when he talked about this role-playing game in a workshop for high school teachers at the beginning of November. Fiesco, charmer and schemer rolled into one, skilfully pulls himself out of the affair: he doesn’t let his hand be seen. Schiller also leaves a lot open; the true motives of the drama’s main character remain unclear. The bot fills its role much better than in the Gretchen chat.
But what was it really like with Julia?
Fürst really wanted to find out. And so at some point he came up with the idea of telling the Fiesco character that he had given her a truth serum:
With that the bot was delivered. He confesses:
The schemer was exposed, at least in this role-playing game.
In other words: the machine is nothing without the people who operate it. The picture shows another excerpt from Robin Fürst’s presentation.
Critics fear that Chat-GPT will completely disrupt school operations. Similar to when computers, the Internet and the smartphone were invented. That shouldn’t happen with this technology either. Chat-GPT is a good sparring partner, also in other subjects. But the typewriter is nothing without the people who operate it. Teachers are nothing without their students, and vice versa. Even professionals like Robin Fürst only work with AI selectively.
“The students have everything written to them by Chat-GPT”
But the bot also has dark sides. This can be seen in another event for teachers and students this month in Zurich. A teacher says: “The students have Chat-GPT write everything to them. This is the reality at Zurich high schools. They are also very good at rewriting so that the text they submit sounds like their own.” This was noticed far too late. A high school student claims: “I haven’t read any of my books. The AI did it all for me. I still got a six.”
A statement that a student posted anonymously after a workshop also gives a deep insight. It says that you use the bot almost every day, and everyone does it in class. The program delivers acceptable results in almost all subjects. So you sit back and let the machine do the work. “The generated texts are sometimes not even read through, let alone corrected or checked for correctness.” People ask Chat-GPT without even thinking, “because it’s faster and easier.” That’s addictive. Not a nice idea.
Teachers have to deal with this. Nobody takes that away from them. Human qualities are also required here. For example, you can have a conversation with the young people. Ask them a question about this or that to find out whether they have really understood the topic of their “own” text – offline, old-fashioned, without any AI.