Convincing AI Socrates to escape prison

Teaching goals

Reading texts is essential to learning philosophy, but it can be challenging for students to connect and interact with literature that is centuries old.

While discussions and written reflections can help students develop a deeper understanding of a text, teachers have used Flint to bring readings to life in a way that is much more engaging for students.

With Flint, the AI can play the role of a character from any text, which can give students an entirely new way of engaging.

In this example, as you can see below, the learning objective the teacher entered centers around Crito, the book by Plato. In this case, the teacher hasn’t uploaded any supporting materials for the AI to pull from. That’s okay, because Flint already has an expansive knowledge base that covers well-known texts.

Extra customization

As the next step of designing this AI tutor, Flint provided the teacher with three options to choose from. These ideas are generated automatically by the AI, based on the learning objective that the teacher provided.

Once the teacher selects a “tutor type”, Flint automatically generates the underlying prompts that the AI will follow as it plays the role of Socrates. As you can see, AI Socrates will ensure that he clearly communicates why he refused to escape from prison.

To give the conversation a sense of urgency (after all, the student will be trying to convince Socrates to escape from prison), we can set a time limit for the conversation.

Student experience

Throughout the conversation with the AI, students will play the role of Crito as they convince AI Socrates to escape from prison.

To better integrate this activity as part of the lesson plan, the teacher can have the student print out their session (or download it as a PDF) to bring into class as the basis for a class-wide discussion.

As a result, AI can be used to help students engage with the text on a deeper level as they develop their own perspective on why Socrates refused to escape from prison. Then, students can share their perspectives with the class and engage in a richer discussion than would be otherwise possible.