In preparation for a course on blogging that I ran recently, I wanted to see how far I could get using AI tools to help me with my intended audience, outlining a post and drafting a whole article. In the first part I used ChatGPT to develop a few personas, ie representatives of my target readership. In this article I report on using AI to generate ideas for blog posts.

Introduction: The Experiment

Fortunately, I am not often stuck for ideas. However, I used the free Tinywow ideas generator to suggest topics I could write about. I told it the subject matter was AI, and the target readership teachers. I discussed this in Part 2.

Using Tinywow’s blog outline generator, I produced an outline for a blog post about From Robots to Virtual Reality: Exploring Exciting Tools for Teaching Programming. Note that so far I’ve written nothing myself, except for a few prompts. Here’s what it came up with:

1.    Introduction: The importance of teaching programming in the digital age

2.    Overview of traditional methods for teaching programming

3.    Introduction to robots as a tool for teaching programming

4.    Benefits of using robots in the classroom

5.    Examples of popular educational robots available in the market

6.    Exploring virtual reality as a tool for teaching programming

7.    Advantages of using virtual reality in programming education

8.    Virtual reality platforms and software for teaching programming concepts

9.    Case studies of successful implementation of virtual reality in programming education

10.Comparison between robots and virtual reality for teaching programming

11.Conclusion: Embracing innovative tools to enhance programming education

If I may anthropologise for a moment, this AI has taken it upon itself to focus only on the supposed benefits of teaching programming with these tools. That bias is embedded in the title” “exciting tools”. However, also embedded, and not fully acted upon, is the word “explore”. That surely ought to include a look at the disadvantages too?

Besides those misgivings, perhaps they could be overlooked if the AI had produced anything genuinely “exciting”. But these ideas seem bland, and certainly not innovative. The most that can be said for this is that it took the AI tool about a second to knock out this list, whereas I might have taken five minutes. The question, of course, is: what has been the true cost of that saving of time?

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