Raiding the inarticulate since 2010

accelerated academy acceleration agency AI Algorithmic Authoritarianism and Digital Repression archer Archive Archiving artificial intelligence automation Becoming Who We Are Between Post-Capitalism and Techno-Fascism big data blogging capitalism ChatGPT claude Cognitive Triage: Practice, Culture and Strategies Communicative Escalation and Cultural Abundance: How Do We Cope? Corporate Culture, Elites and Their Self-Understandings craft creativity critical realism data science Defensive Elites desire Digital Capitalism and Digital Social Science Digital Distraction, Personal Agency and The Reflexive Imperative Digital Elections, Party Politics and Diplomacy digital elites Digital Inequalities Digital Social Science Digital Sociology digital sociology Digital Universities elites Fragile Movements and Their Politics Cultures generative AI higher education Interested labour Lacan Listening LLMs margaret archer Organising personal morphogenesis Philosophy of Technology platform capitalism platforms populism Post-Democracy, Depoliticisation and Technocracy post-truth psychoanalysis public engagement public sociology publishing Reading realism reflexivity scholarship Shadow Mobilization, Astroturfing and Manipulation Social Media Social Media for Academics social media for academics social ontology social theory sociology technology The Content Ecosystem The Intensification of Work The Political Economy of Digital Capitalism The Technological History of Digital Capitalism Thinking trump twitter Uncategorized work writing zizek

Why prompting should not be our focus when teaching students about AI

This is a sketch of a much longer piece of work I need to start:

  • The role of prompting is diminishing as chatbots develop because they increasingly infer and pre-empt what the user shares. It’s no longer a crucial skill for using them effectively and we need to avoid presenting it as if it is.
  • As Essien et al put it, “agency in prompting does not automatically produce learning; without reflective regulation, it may become only efficient prompting”. The student might still treat uncritically accept outputs, outsource to a self-defeating degree or engage in malpractice while nonetheless prompting effectively.
  • It’s hard to talk about prompting without veering into the terrain of ‘prompt engineering’. This is a contingent feature of the discourse but there’s a whole theory of what models are implicit in the notion of ‘prompt engineering’ which is really unhelpful for learning: imagining prompting as a form of natural language coding through which you unlock the capabilities of the machine.
  • The language of prompting also lends itself to thinking about single-shot interaction which is not how you use a chatbot in reflective and thoughtful ways. Again there’s nothing necessary about this but the discourse constrains our capacity to emphasise the dialogical element as essential while still talking about prompting.
  • If we see the use of chatbots for learning in terms of dialogue, then we need a dialogical vocabulary for thinking about it. What makes for a better or worse conversation? What is the student bringing to the model? How are they greeting the responses of the chatbot? How does the interaction unfold through these dynamics over time? This is the terrain we need to work on and again I think the language gets in the way.
  • The capabilities involved in this are much more like literacy more broadly than the language of prompting can really account for. To write fluently, confidently and thoughtfully equips you to prompt effectively. To draw upon a range of references in expansive and relevant ways unlocks the capability of the model to respond to complexity. If we talk about this as ‘prompting’ we redescribe what are relatively familiar aspirations of humanistic education in an unhelpful way. This also obscures inequalities of cultural capital in who can do this and who cannot do it.

I realise in writing this my problem is less with prompting and more on prioritising it and the conceptual baggage which comes with it. Instead I suggest the focus needs to be on student agency when using chatbots. Essien et al again:

When students maintain control over goals, prompts, evaluation, and final judgement, the feared risk of cognitive atrophy may be reduced (Yang et al. 2024), and AI may function less as a surrogate and more as a dialogic partner (Krakowski 2025). This aligns with warnings that passive AI use may weaken learning (Linde- baum et al. 2025).

Fediverse Reactions
, , , , ,
,