Davide Taibi

h-index15
2papers
1,197citations

2 Papers

9.2HCJul 4, 2023
Learning to Prompt in the Classroom to Understand AI Limits: A pilot study

Emily Theophilou, Cansu Koyuturk, Mona Yavari et al.

Artificial intelligence's (AI) progress holds great promise in tackling pressing societal concerns such as health and climate. Large Language Models (LLM) and the derived chatbots, like ChatGPT, have highly improved the natural language processing capabilities of AI systems allowing them to process an unprecedented amount of unstructured data. However, the ensuing excitement has led to negative sentiments, even as AI methods demonstrate remarkable contributions (e.g. in health and genetics). A key factor contributing to this sentiment is the misleading perception that LLMs can effortlessly provide solutions across domains, ignoring their limitations such as hallucinations and reasoning constraints. Acknowledging AI fallibility is crucial to address the impact of dogmatic overconfidence in possibly erroneous suggestions generated by LLMs. At the same time, it can reduce fear and other negative attitudes toward AI. This necessitates comprehensive AI literacy interventions that educate the public about LLM constraints and effective usage techniques, i.e prompting strategies. With this aim, a pilot educational intervention was performed in a high school with 21 students. It involved presenting high-level concepts about intelligence, AI, and LLMs, followed by practical exercises involving ChatGPT in creating natural educational conversations and applying established prompting strategies. Encouraging preliminary results emerged, including high appreciation of the activity, improved interaction quality with the LLM, reduced negative AI sentiments, and a better grasp of limitations, specifically unreliability, limited understanding of commands leading to unsatisfactory responses, and limited presentation flexibility. Our aim is to explore AI acceptance factors and refine this approach for more controlled future studies.

4.3CYMar 4, 2025
Use Me Wisely: AI-Driven Assessment for LLM Prompting Skills Development

Dimitri Ognibene, Gregor Donabauer, Emily Theophilou et al.

The use of large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots, such as ChatGPT, has become popular across various domains, supporting a range of tasks and processes. However, due to the intrinsic complexity of LLMs, effective prompting is more challenging than it may seem. This highlights the need for innovative educational and support strategies that are both widely accessible and seamlessly integrated into task workflows. Yet, LLM prompting is highly task- and domain-dependent, limiting the effectiveness of generic approaches. In this study, we explore whether LLM-based methods can facilitate learning assessments by using ad-hoc guidelines and a minimal number of annotated prompt samples. Our framework transforms these guidelines into features that can be identified within learners' prompts. Using these feature descriptions and annotated examples, we create few-shot learning detectors. We then evaluate different configurations of these detectors, testing three state-of-the-art LLMs and ensembles. We run experiments with cross-validation on a sample of original prompts, as well as tests on prompts collected from task-naive learners. Our results show how LLMs perform on feature detection. Notably, GPT- 4 demonstrates strong performance on most features, while closely related models, such as GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 Turbo (Instruct), show inconsistent behaviors in feature classification. These differences highlight the need for further research into how design choices impact feature selection and prompt detection. Our findings contribute to the fields of generative AI literacy and computer-supported learning assessment, offering valuable insights for both researchers and practitioners.