Therapy session with AI Winston from 1984

Teaching goals

1984 is essential reading for many high school students, but simply reading the book and writing reflections might not be enough to understand the complex relationship between truth and ideology that the book covers.

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

Here, we’ll explore the use case of a teacher designing an AI tutor to play the role of Winston from 1984, where students will both demonstrate their social-emotional skills and further develop their understanding of the book.

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. Because the learning objective was rather open-ended, Flint was able to generate some pretty creative tutor options.

Once the teacher selects the desired “tutor type”, Flint automatically generated the underlying prompts that the AI will follow as it plays the role of Winston from 1984. As you can see, AI Winston will answer student questions about Winston’s feelings and the context of society within the book, including his thoughts on living under a totalitarian regime, Party surveillance, and views on freedom and individuality.

To ensure that AI Winston discusses the themes in the book that are most important, we can use the “revise” feature to tweak his behavior.

Student experience

Throughout the session, students will have the opportunity to interview AI Winston. The student can click the microphone button to verbally ask questions to the AI, and the AI will speak back to them as well — all in a timed session.

To help students develop their understanding of the character as well as the larger themes at play in “1984”, the AI will provide in-depth explanations as it plays the role of Winston, and will even explain his decision to betray Julia.