Teaching AI Literacy: Can AI Feel What You Feel?
An experiment with me, myself and Generative AI Part 1
In a world where the number of AI users is increasing every other day, teachers’ responsibility to teach students how to use it is becoming essential. We should teach our students to use AI ethically and we should also become AI literate. Our students are mostly feeding the tools they are using with the tasks we assign them and copying the results into a Word document to hand in. We are often helpless when it comes to detecting AI-generated work, as AI checker tools are not very reliable. However, we can easily identify AI-generated texts by their flawlessness, lack of personal voice, use of predictable linking words, overuse of em-dashes, overly clear paragraphing, and word choice. In addition, we know our our students’ classroom performance and, of course, we have our instincts.
This is something I want to try with my students to show how we actually write, how AI generates and how we can identify who has written what.
This is a prompt I worked on:
“Write about the moment you realized your childhood home was sold. Word limit 150-160 words.”
First, I wrote a response, then prompted ChatGPT and Gemini:
“Write about the moment you realized your childhood home was sold. You are a non-native fluent English speaker. 150-160 words.”
1. It happened on a rainy afternoon, entirely out of the blue, while I was casually scrolling through a local real estate app. There it was—the unmistakable facade of my childhood home, stamped with a cold, definitive “SOLD” banner across the listing photo. A sudden, sharp ache bloomed in my chest, catching me completely off guard. The digital image felt like a betrayal; those walls, which had sheltered my loudest laughter and deepest teenage angst, had officially been reduced to mere square footage and a transaction number.
In that fleeting second, the finality of moving on truly hit me. I realized that the creaky third step of the staircase, the secret notch carved into the kitchen doorframe marking my height, and the sprawling backyard tree where I used to dream no longer belonged to my history. They were now just background noise in a stranger’s new beginning.
2. I realized my childhood home had been sold on a quiet Sunday afternoon while I was scrolling through old messages on my phone. My mother casually mentioned that the new owners had already started renovating the kitchen, and for a few seconds I could not even respond. It felt strange that a place which had once contained every important memory of my early life now belonged to complete strangers. I suddenly remembered the faded wallpaper in the hallway, the sound of rain hitting my bedroom window, and the small marks on the wall that my father used to measure my height every year. Although I had not lived there for a long time, I always believed that the house would somehow remain untouched, waiting for me in the background of my life.
What surprised me most was not sadness alone, but the realization that childhood itself had quietly become something distant and unreachable. A house is only bricks and furniture, yet we attach entire versions of ourselves to those spaces. Knowing that another family would create their own routines there made me understand how temporary everything truly is. At the same time, I felt grateful because the house had already fulfilled its purpose: it gave me safety, laughter, and memories that still shape who I am today. In the end, I understood that home is not a physical place anymore, but a collection of moments that continue to live inside me.
3. My mom sold the house I grew up in and gave the keys to me to hand them to the new owner. I wanted to go there for one more time. I opened the door and there I heard the sounds that had clung to the walls, the echoes of our family story told by my grandmother and grandfather in the room next to the front door would be lost. I watched the beautiful silhouette of my mother on the staircase climbing up from the living room to the bedroom. I was feeling dizzy. I was sad. The house was going to be demolished.
As I stepped out the door, I turned back for one last look. The empty windows, their curtains removed, were sending me off with sadness. I wanted to leave, yet I couldn’t bring myself to go. It was as if I was saying goodbye to someone I loved. The place where I grew up, where I became who I am, would no longer exist. I told myself it was time to let go of the sorrows I had silently wept on that little balcony. I tucked all the beautiful memories I had lived into my heart, and quietly stepped out the door.
Can you identify which one is written by me? Why?
And can you identify which paragraph is written by which tool?
And here is the lesson idea that you can try with your learners:
Write a paragraph on any topic you want to work on. Ask two different AI tools to generate the same paragraph. Copy the paragraphs into a Word document, put students in groups, and ask them to identify which one was written by you and justify their answers.
Do you think this lesson will be useful for teaching AI Literacy?
If you try this, please let me know how it went.
This post was originally published on my Substack. You can also follow me there for more.
