Fiction as a mirror for students using AI
A method to use fictional characters as partners for self-inquiry through intentional AI prompts.
Stories allow children to recognise complex truths before they have the vocabulary to describe them. A character’s fear shows them their own. A poem’s strange image stays with them because something inside recognises it. Yet as they grow, many learn to treat art as entertainment instead of invitation. Fiction becomes ‘not real.’ Poetry ‘means nothing’. Drama and painting ‘feel distant.’ The result is a quiet narrowing of their inner world.
In this post we will:
Offer a way to use fictional figures as partners for self inquiry.
Work with a prompt that keeps the student at the centre of meaning making.
Consider how this practice can deepen attention to art and to life.
Slow AI can help widen it again. If a system can take on the voice of a fictional historical figure, it can offer students a frame for asking better questions about their own lives. This method prioritises student reflection over automated moral lessons. Used carefully, AI becomes a way for students to practise seeing their lives as works of art, shaped by choices, constraints, and imagination.
This week’s Slow AI prompt is co-authored with Steve Peha at Questions Worth Answering About AI and Education. Steve works at the intersection of writing, teaching, and inquiry. In his classroom work, he has long used characters as mirrors for personal reflection. Bringing that method into an AI context offers a way for students to explore truth inside and beyond the text.
The aim here is to use AI as a companion that helps students discover meaning rather than dismiss it. Here, the student remains the primary source of meaning.
Stories are often the first places where young people encounter difficult truths. This exercise returns them to that source.
Step-by-step
Try this prompt with your AI tool of choice, and invite your students to do the same:
You are [character] from [work of art]. What can you teach me about [idea]. I do not need a long explanation or examples from your life. Give me one paragraph and three questions I can ask myself about my own life.
Read the paragraph slowly. Let the three questions settle.
If you are doing this with your students, then introduce the exercise by demonstrating the prompt on a shared screen. Allow students to choose their own figures or provide a curated list relevant to your current curriculum. Require five minutes of silent writing after the AI generates the questions and use these written reflections as the foundation for small group discussions. This structure ensures that students engage with their own thoughts before they are influenced by the opinions of their peers.
AI tools train on the data users provide, so try not to include sensitive personal details or identifiable private information in your prompts. You can also use this constraint as a teaching opportunity: discuss with students how data persistence works and why maintaining digital boundaries is necessary, explaining that AI tools are a mirror for their own thoughts rather than a private confidant. This practice develops essential digital literacy alongside the core reflection exercise.
If you are new to Slow AI, here is our first invitation.
A moment from Steve Peha
Every time I have a chance to work with high school or college seniors, I love to teach Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
Few kids have heard about it. Most think it’s boring and weird for about the first 50 pages. But it all clicks in when they realize that they’re ready to get outta dodge and hit the blue highways just like the book’s main character Sal Paradise.
I’ve read the book at least five times. I’ve seen the 120-foot long 'scroll upon which Kerouac typed his famous first draft of beat scripture. I’ve been served coffee by his daughter, Jan.
The book has always held a sacredness for me. But I didn’t know exactly why until I ran the prompt myself:
You are Sal Paradise from Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. What can you teach me about road trips. I do not need a long explanation or examples from your life. Give me one paragraph and three questions I can ask myself about my own life.
This is what I got back:
Man, a road trip teaches you that the world is bigger than your worries and looser than your plans. The road keeps saying, Relax, kid—let life happen a little. When you’re out there, you remember that motion clears the mind, chance is a teacher, and sometimes the best direction is simply forward.
Ask yourself:
When was the last time I let wonder—not worry—set my direction?
What am I clinging to that keeps me from exploring something new?
What inner direction have I felt but never followed?
That hit hard. It really did.
Forty-five years ago, something changed in my life that I never understood. Until tonight.
In the middle of my junior year of high school, I gave up being a 3-sport jock.I bombed out of my fifth computer science class. I dropped calculus. And quit the chess club.
I replaced these things I’d been clinging to for years with drama, concert choir, jazz choir, and a class on poetry writing. Things I’d never done before.
Over and over that year, right up to graduation, something outlandish kept popping into my head, usually on the long solitary walks high school kids have to make when they don’t have cars.
What I wanted (and I absolutely knew I wanted it) was to leave my hometown of Seattle, WA, get a Martin guitar, buy a clunker of a car, and hit the road for Nashville to become a songwriter, playing my way across the country in every open mic night I could find until I reached the Bluebird Café.
But not going to college was not what people did in my family. So tightly was I clinging to the things I was, the things that kept me from exploring something new. I never made a move toward what I wanted to be.,
What I just realized about myself is that I’ve also passed on half a dozen other life-shaping adventures. And always for the same reason: I was clinging to the safety of a good ordinary life and the fear of losing it in the passion of exploring the extraordinary unknown.
This is what fiction, and indeed all art, all history, all stories, can do for us: give us insight into the deepest desires of the heart and the desiderata of the soul.
Every kid gets reading lessons, but few get lessons like the one I just got, much less the opportunity to reflect and write about the truth of who they are and how they feel.
Every kid gets reading lessons, but few get lessons like those, much less the opportunity to reflect and write about the truth of who they are and how they feel.
And, for the joy and sanity of our teachers, this is real writing. It has to be. You can’t answer those big, open-hearted questions by pasting them into a prompt window and copying out the answer. You have to slow down. You have to think. And then you usually have to think some more. You might have to think for the rest of your life.
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What to do with it
If you want to share:
Describe the character you used and why that choice mattered.
Name the question that opened something unexpected in your own thinking.
If you tried it with any students, explain how their responses shifted once they realised the meaning was theirs to generate.
You do not need to produce an ‘interpretation.’ The work here is noticing.
Why this matters
Inquiry is a habit, not an assignment. If students learn to use characters, poems, paintings, and historical lives as sources of questions rather than answers, they carry that habit outside school. They begin to see their own lives as shaped by choices, forces, and possibilities. AI can either dull that capacity or support it. The difference lies in how we use it.
Slow AI offers a way to bring technology into the classroom without losing the depth that art provides.
Useful in short bursts.
Grounded in attention.
Always secondary to the living work of reading, thinking, and making meaning.
If you enjoyed this post, you can visit Subscribe to Questions Worth Answering About AI and Education, where Steve Peha examines how thoughtful questions shape learning and how AI can support students without taking over their thinking.
From Using AI for Meditation
Tom Evans and I were encouraged by the consensus that AI should function as a reflective mirror rather than a spiritual authority.
Mark S, PhD argued that using AI for meditation constitutes a pre-meditative practice rather than a substitute for the direct observation of the mindstream. He noted that true meditation requires sitting with thoughts free from any outside foci. In his view, the mind is the only tool required to observe itself. He suggested that external digital aids are symptoms of a restless mind and should be discarded once a practitioner can tolerate boredom and discomfort.
Dennis Berry stated that while AI can assist in monitoring physical tension or breathing patterns, the resulting calm is a product of personal attention. He identified the tool as a prompt rather than a source of insight. This perspective reinforces the principle that the human remains the primary agent in any reflective process. The AI provides a frame, but the internal state depends entirely on the focus of the individual.
Peter Jansen distinguished between using AI as a diagnostic tool and using it as a spiritual guru. He cautioned that a simulation of peace provided by an algorithm is distinct from a biological audit of physical sensations. For Jansen, the utility of the AI ends when the screen is closed. The significant work of mindfulness occurs in the silence that follows the cessation of the digital interaction.
The value of these tools lies in their ability to provide intentional friction. By using AI to slow down rather than speed up, we can create the necessary distance to examine our own thoughts with greater clarity.
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If you try this week’s prompt, Steve Peha and I would love to hear which fictional characters you and your students chose and why.
We read and respond to all your comments.
Go slow.
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here is the response of the prompt from Chatgpt:
I’d tell you this: a road trip isn’t about the miles or the map, it’s about loosening your grip on who you think you’re supposed to be and letting the road shake something honest out of you. Go light, trust chance, listen harder than you speak, and don’t rush past the people or moments that crack you open even the uncomfortable ones. The road teaches you by motion: keep moving, stay curious, and let wonder exhaust you before fear does.
Three questions to ask yourself:
What part of me needs movement to wake up again?
Where am I clinging to safety instead of truth?
If I followed my curiosity instead of my plans, where might I end up?
that is a wonderful prompt, I am a big advocate of integrating metaphor fiction /philosophy or literature , it really ease the delivery and the anchor of the message .
I LOVE this so much. What a great way to use AI 🙌