Day 17 – Ask Better Questions, Critique Your Work – 30 Day AI Challenge 2024

Welcome to the 2024 Edition of the #30DayAIChallenge. This year, we’ll be focusing on making Generative AI more accessible for all. So follow along and give each challenge a try yourself, plus share your own thoughts and experiments with a community of like-minded learners and tinkerers!*

Week 3’s theme is “School of Bots“, tackling AI and education, with a view on improving our ability to learn, as well as teach others (including our kids!).

Today’s Challenge: Ask Better Questions, Get Better Results!

Day 17 brings us to a crucial skill in an AI-enhanced world: asking better questions and critiquing your own work. This skill is fundamental not just in creative pursuits but in every aspect of problem-solving and learning.

How To Get Started

For beginners, this challenge is an opportunity to develop a keen eye for detail and a mind for deeper questioning. Start by identifying a project or task you’ve recently worked on or are currently working on. Here are a few steps to guide you:

• Define the Purpose: First, clearly articulate the goal of your work. Understanding your objective is key to asking relevant questions.

Asking Better Questions with Generative AI

• Use AI Tools for Assistance: Leverage AI chatbots like ChatGPT to brainstorm questions related to your project.
• For example, if you’re writing an article, you could ask, “What are key points I should cover in an article about sustainable living?”
• You can also ask the chatbot to provide multiple alternative phrasings of the same question. This helps explore different angles.
• Opposite Thinking: Ask an AI chatbot for the opposite of your question. Analyzing the contrary point can spark new, insightful questions.
• “Why” Chain: Use a chatbot and start with a question. Then take its answer, make it your new question, and ask “Why?” (after all, toddlers do this incredibly well…and are superb learners! 😄). Repeat the process to deepen your inquiry.
• Socratic Challenge: Provide a claim or statement to the chatbot. Have the AI relentlessly question your statement like Socrates to reveal its weaknesses and generate deeper questions.
• Data-Driven Prompts: Gather some data relevant to your topic (even a small set). Ask a generative AI tool to analyze the data and suggest questions the data might be able to answer. This helps focus your thinking.

Critiquing Your Work With Generative AI

• Use general or custom AI chatbots to review your work. Ask for feedback on coherence, relevance, and engagement. For instance, “How can I make my introduction more engaging?”
• Iterate Based on Feedback: The first draft or two is never the best. Use the feedback to refine your work. This might mean rewriting sections, researching more, or changing your approach.
• Tone/Sentiment Analysis: Run your writing through a sentiment analysis tool to identify the overall emotional tone. Does it match your intent?
• Summarization: Ask a chatbot to summarize your work. Does the summary accurately represent your core ideas?
• Bias Check: Ask the AI to analyze your writing for potential biases (gender, cultural, etc.). It might not be perfect, but it can help raise awareness.
• Prompt Crafting: Use generative AI to create specific critique prompts based on your needs. For example: “Identify the three weakest arguments in this essay and provide suggestions for strengthening them.”
• Comparative Analysis: Feed in both an earlier draft and the revised version. Ask the chatbot to pinpoint the specific changes made and evaluate if they improve the work.

Important Considerations

• Generative AI tools are powerful, but they are not a replacement for your own critical thinking. Use them as a springboard, not the final word.
• Combining your own experience and creativity with AI assisted insights and content produces the best results.
• Always consider the limitations and potential biases of the AI tools you’re using.

A Few Challenges To Try Out Now

• The Blind Critique: Write a short piece. Have your favourite AI chatbot critique it WITHOUT revealing your intended topic, then try to guess what topic the AI thinks you were writing about. This exposes blindspots.
• The “5 Whys” Challenge: Start with a problem related to your project. Force yourself to use a generative AI chatbot to get answers by only asking successive “Why?” questions, digging deeper with each iteration.
• Reframing Contest: Take a negative critique from someone (or generate one using AI). Task a chatbot to reframe it as a constructive opportunity. This builds an improvement-focused mindset.
• Reverse Engineer the Prompt: Feed a well-written piece (an article, poem, etc.) to a Gen AI chatbot. Ask it to guess what the original prompts used to create this piece might have been. This can help you learn techniques and strategies for effective prompting.
• AI Debate Partner: Outline an argument. Have a generative AI chatbot create and defend the counter-argument. Analyze the AI-generated responses and strengthen your own position.
• Style Mimicry: Select an author you admire (or dislike!), then feed the AI chatbot samples of their work. See if the AI can generate a new text in that style. Using your own writing, have the tool try to adapt your piece to that same style. This highlights stylistic choices of others and your own.

Practical Examples

Scenario: Planning a Small Gathering

• Typical Question: “What should we do for Ken’s birthday?”
• Reframing with Generative AI:
  1. Generate Interests: Ask a chatbot to list 20 different fun activities or outing ideas in your local area. Don’t limit yourself to the usual suspects!
  2. Identify Constraints: Ask the chatbot, “What factors might limit the kind of activity we can do for Ken’s birthday?” The chatbot might bring up budget, weather, guest preferences, accessibility, etc.
  3. The “What if?” Question: Feed the chatbot some constraints and an activity idea. Then ask “What if…” questions to test the idea’s feasibility and uncover unexpected possibilities. Example: “What if it rains on the day we wanted to have a picnic?”

Practical Benefits: Instead of starting with a vague question, you’re using AI to broaden your options, consider limitations from the beginning, and troubleshoot potential problems. This leads to better, more informed questions when discussing the party with Ken and other guests.

Critiquing Your Work: Summarization

• The Task: Take an email you’ve written (work or personal). Feed it into your favourite AI chatbot.
• Analyze: Does the AI-generated summary capture the essence of what you meant to say? Are your most important points included? Is your tone conveyed correctly?

Practical Benefits: This quick exercise reveals if your communication is as clear as intended. It highlights areas where you might be overly wordy or unfocused, helping you streamline your writing.

Conclusion

Mastering the art of asking better questions and critiquing your work with AI’s help is a skill that evolves over time. It requires patience, practice, and a willingness to experiment. As AI technology advances, the scope for what’s possible in self-assessment and inquiry will undoubtedly expand, offering even more sophisticated tools for our intellectual and creative arsenals.

If you give any of these tools or challenges a try, leave a comment and share your experience! If you’re using other platforms to post, please tag your Facebook, Twitter / X or LinkedIn post with #30DayAIChallenge so others can find it too.

Till tomorrow…

*Please note: Participation in the 30 Day AI Challenge is at your own discretion and responsibility. Always ensure that no sensitive personal information, confidential, or proprietary company data is shared. Adhere to all applicable local laws and company policies. Enjoy exploring AI responsibly!