Researchers are using artificial-intelligence tools to build their own platforms for teaching. Credit: wichan sumalee / Getty Images

Last November, our poetry students walked into the computer laboratory and found something new: a web interface with chat-room windows labelled “the structured studio” and “the exploratory atelier”. Each chat room ran the same artificial-intelligence chatbot that students could use to co-write poems in English, but the chatbot behaved differently between the two. In one case, the chatbot took creative risks, pushing students towards surprising metaphors; in the other, it was cautious and literal.

Behind the chat-room windows was a custom AI platform that none of us — a language teacher, an English-literature PhD candidate and a literature professor all at Hong Kong Baptist University — could have built by ourselves.

Our project began with a simple question: how can teachers use AI to help learners write poetry in English?…