German Robot Teaches Class and Poe Tells Stories

Navigating the future with only mild panic

Author

David Williams
January 12, 2025

AI Edge for Higher Ed

Welcome AI Explorers.

Welcome to your weekly dose of AI literacy! This week we're diving into the art of making AI hallucinate (and more importantly, how not to), exploring a fascinating platform that lets you chat with multiple AI personalities, and checking out some robot teachers in Germany (spoiler: they're not quite ready to take over just yet).

In this edition:

  • ๐Ÿค– How to make AI tell tall tales (and how to keep it honest)

  • ๐ŸŽฎ Poe: Your gateway to chatting with multiple AI personalities

  • ๐ŸŽ Robot teachers make their debut (but still can't handle playground duty)

  • ๐Ÿ“Š The future of jobs in 2025 (hint: we're all going back to school)

  • ๐ŸŽ“ Open Scholar: The new academic assistant that's impressing actual scientists

  • ๐Ÿ“ฑ Fresh AI tools and updates worth checking out

  • ๐Ÿ“… Upcoming events to expand your AI knowledge

  • ๐Ÿง  A 9-hour Google course condensed into a quick 1 minute read (because who has 9 hours?)
     

Time to navigate another week in the world of AI and education, where the robots are friendly, the hallucinations are fixable, and the future is revealing itself one LLM update at a time.

Prompt of the Week ๐Ÿ’ญ

Let's not look at a specific prompt, but consider what kind of prompting could lead towards a greater chance of hallucinations (confabulations), and then conversely how do you prompt to minimize the chance of hallucinations.

How to Make AI Hallucinate (and How to Avoid It)

  • Vague Prompts = Wild Guesses
    Open-ended questions without boundaries lead AI to make things up. Instead of asking about "what's the future of education," narrow your focus to specific trends or timeframes.
     

  • Super Specific & Strange? Expect Fiction
    When you ask about rare or obscure topics, AI has limited data to work with. It tries to piece together an answer from related concepts, often creating plausible but incorrect responses.
     

  • Mixing Concepts? It Gets Confused
    Combining unrelated concepts (like "quantum physics explained through medieval farming") forces AI to make connections where none exist. This creative bridging often leads to imaginative but inaccurate results.
     

  • No Context = Bad Assumptions
    Without clear direction about audience, purpose, or scope, AI fills gaps with whatever seems logical. This usually means pulling from inappropriate knowledge areas.
     

  • Numbers are Tricky
    Neural networks struggle with precise counting and statistics. When asked for exact figures, AI often generates confident but incorrect numbers that sound reasonable.
     

  • Time Travel Troubles
    AI's knowledge is frozen in time, based on its training data (although that is changing with built in search capabilities). Questions about current events or recent developments often yield outdated or confused responses.
     

How to Get Better AI Answers:

  • Be Specific: Set clear boundaries and expectations
     

  • Simplify: Break complex questions into smaller parts
     

  • Provide Info: Include reference materials for fact-checking
     

  • Ask for Confidence: Request uncertainty levels when needed
     

  • Show, Don't Tell: Give examples of your desired response type
     

  • Turn it off and on again: Anecdotally, it seems if you stay in the same chat for too long, the chances of hallucination go up. It may help to re-ask a question in a new chat.

AI App Spotlight ๐ŸŽญ

Poe (Platform for Open Exploration) is an AI chatbot platform developed by Quora. It allows users to interact with various AI models in one interface, facilitating exploration and comparison of different AI capabilities.

I don't think I've highlighted the AI platform Poe before, and that is a bit of an oversight. Poe is a chatbot interface like ChatGPT or Claude, but the primary difference is that the platform provides you access to many different large language models (including ChatGPT and Claude). It also gives you access to image generators, although the best of the image generators are only available with the paid version.

You can also create "bots" which are like comprehensive and reusable prompts for doing a particular task or acting in a particular which. An example of this is a text based zombie survival game which is like a choose your own adventure novel that is created on the fly based on your choices. You can use bots created by others, share your bots, and even make money when others use your bots.

Poe is available for free - you get 3,000 points per day which can be used towards messages, but you need to watch carefully because the length of the message and the model that you use determine how many credits are used in each message. For example premium models like Claude requires about 350 points per typical message (about 3000 words) while smaller models require fewer credits (e.g., GPT-4o-mini requires 15 points/message)

๐Ÿ”‘ Key Takeaways: Poe

  • Free platform with access to multiple AI models (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.)

  • 3,000 daily points (15-350 points per message)

  • Create, share, or use custom AI bots

  • Great for comparing different AI models and capabilities

  • Available at Poe.com

Side note: I went through Poe looking for a decent example of a bot, discovered the Zombie game and played it for a while. It was surprisingly entertaining although felt more like a lucid dream than a challenge because I could guide the story any way that I wanted to. If you want to try it, it's "Zombie Survival" by charlielezekiel. It will start writing in Chinese - just tell it "english plz"

Some other apps/app updateds to check out:

๐Ÿ“ฐAI News of the Week

In a fascinating education experiment, a robot named Captcha taught a class at Germany's Willms High School, delivering a lesson on AI vs. human thinking. While students praised Captcha's solid arguments and discussion skills, they noted the missing "human touch." This experiment highlights AI's potential in education but also underscores its limitations in providing the personal connection that human educators offer.
 

Meta has removed its AI character accounts from Instagram and Facebook after users criticized them as "creepy and unnecessary." The AI characters, initially part of a 2023 experiment, were pulled due to a bug preventing users from blocking them. This incident underscores how fraught it is for tech companies to navigate between AI innovation and user trust.
 

(AGI=Artificial General Intelligence: a theoretical form of AI capable of understanding, learning, and performing any intellectual task that a human can)

The World Economic just released the "The Future of Jobs Report 2025".

While not exclusively focused on AI, the technology's impact features prominently throughout the findings. Here are the key highlights:
Labor Market Trends

  • Technological change emerges as the primary driver of labor market transformation.

  • By 2025-2030, approximately 40% of workers' existing skill sets will require significant transformation.

  • Skill gaps remain the most significant barrier to business transformation.
     

Most Valued Skills for the Future

  • Analytical Thinking (highest demand)

  • Resilience, Flexibility, and Agility

  • Leadership and Social Influence

  • Cybersecurity Expertise

  • Talent Management

  • Environmental Stewardship
     

Education Sector Impact

  • University and higher education teaching positions are projected to be the 14th fastest-growing job category by 2030 (by volume, not percentage growth).
     

Organizational Responses to AI Integration
Organizations are adapting through:

  • Upskilling existing workforce

  • Strategic hiring of new talent

  • Organizational restructuring

  • Role transitions

  • Selective downsizing where necessary
    This report underscores the critical importance of continuous learning and adaptation in the face of rapid technological change, particularly relevant for educators preparing students for this evolving landscape.

AI Powered Pedagogy ๐Ÿ‘ฉโ€๐Ÿซ

  1. Hone your own expertise

  2. Develop a mentor mindset (for your AI assistant)

  3. Level-up your AI knowledge

  4. Master Advanced Prompting

Open Scholar is a free, open-source AI assistant from UW and Allen AI that delivers accurate answers with real citations. It has a 12% improvement over GPT-4o in correctness(1). 70% of Scientists in a blind test preferred Open scholar's responses over ChatGPT. It is a useful tool in helping researchers find and synthesize knowledge from a research database and you can use it now: Open Scholar. Learn more
(1) Correctness measures "the degree of overlap between model generated answer and human-annotated reference"

Upcoming Events
You may find these seminars interesting, but I don't have any insight into how good or informative they will be for you)

The mAIn Event

The Video "Google's 9 Hour AI Prompt Engineering Course in 20 Minutes" in 2 Minutes

The Google Prompting Essentials course provides a five step process for writing effective prompts and outlines some use use cases for everyday work tasks, data analysis, presentation building, and enhancing creative tasks. The total course time is about 9 hours to go through all the modules. It's available for free.

Youtuber Tina Huang boiled the essentials down to a 20 minute summary

and highlights the important parts and gives you some silly acronyms (Tiny Crabs Ride Enormous Iguanas) to remember the prompting guidelines.

I've boiled down the video into a 2 minute read, so you barely even have to do any work to learn 9 hours worth of content:

This video summarizes Google's 9-hour AI Prompt Engineering course, covering everything from the basics to advanced techniques.

1. Prompting Essentials:

  • 5 Steps to prompting: Task, Context, References, Evaluate, Iterate (Tiny Crabs Ride Enormous Iguanas).

  • Multimodality: Use diverse inputs/outputs (images, audio, video).

  • 5 Tips for prompt iteration: Revisit, Analogous, Constraints, Shorter Sentences (Rahen Saves Tragic Idiots).

2. Everyday Work Tasks:

  • AI can help with emails, brainstorming, summarizing, and more. Provide context and references for best results.

3. Data & Presentations:

  • Use AI to analyze data and build presentations. Prioritize data privacy and security.

4. Creative & Expert Partner:

  • Advanced Techniques: Prompt chaining, chain of thought, tree of thought.

  • AI Agents: Specialized AI for tasks (simulation, expert feedback).

  • Creating Agents: Define Persona, Context, Conversation type, Stop phrase, and give Feedback.

I'm joking, of course, about using AI to learn 9 hours of content in 1 minute. Google's 9-hour course is certainly worth checking out if you are relatively new prompting. You can also pick and choose which content appeals to you, so don't have to go through the full 9 hours. At the very least, the video is worth viewing because it really does capture all of the most important pieces of the course through specific examples.

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