AI as Character

Submitter: Nicole Mills, Harvard U

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The experiment:

In my second-semester French language course, “Paris in Virtual Reality,” students wrote character profiles and used them as prompts for AI avatars powered by ChatGPT. Throughout the course, students developed French-speaking characters living in the same building in Paris. In this fictional world, one character was murdered in a surrealist scene in the Centre Pompidou modern art museum. Students gathered in a Visualization Lab where they saw their own characters (and written work) come to life in a virtual gallery space including walls adorned with adaptations of Magritte’s surrealist work “Querelle des Universaux” and views of Paris (all created with AI tools).

Each student submitted a composition detailing the character’s self-portrait, alibi, and questions regarding the murder. Then each student had the opportunity to ask their character a personalized question in French and wait to see how their character might respond. Then students “interrogated” the two guilty characters using voice recognition and voice synthesis. Students were asked to carefully prepare their questions using targeted grammatical structures and practice their pronunciation to ensure that their questions would be understood by their AI characters. After multiple Q&As with the suspects, the students voted to choose the guilty party before they heard the truth from the very point of view of the victim’s ghost – who magically came to life at the end.

Results:

When asked about their classroom experience at the end of the two sessions, students were overwhelmingly positive, with 100% of them stating that it was a highly engaging experiment, citing strong indicators of behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional engagement. The AI chatbots sometimes did not understand their questions due to student accent or mispronunciation, however this hurdle became a strong motivator for students to increase their efforts to enhance their pronunciation and pronunciation workshop stages were added to the lesson. ‍Overall, the project integrated attention to grammatical accuracy, comprehension of both written and audio texts, and writing skills in a simulated, yet culturally grounded context.‍‍

Relevant resources: Presentation and Demo of AI Characters in English

Contact: https://works.bepress.com/nicole_mills/