Why some roles cannot connect an assistant

Grapevine lets people connect an AI assistant to a site, so it can read and write courses on their behalf. Two roles cannot do this: contributors, who write content, and assistants, who grade work.

This is not about trust in you

Everything you can do in the screens, you keep. Nothing has been taken away and nothing about your role has changed. What you cannot do is hand that same ability to something that works unattended.

The distinction the software is drawing is not “how much power does this person have” — it is “should this power be exercised without anybody watching”. A connection works quickly, from a machine that may not be in the building, at times nobody chose. Both of your roles are ones where somebody else drew the boundary you work inside: a contributor writes the lessons they were asked to write, an assistant grades the work in front of them. Setting an automated process running inside somebody else’s boundary is a different kind of act from working inside it yourself.

So the people who can start one are the ones who own the course or own the site, and who would be answerable for what it did.

What to do if you want this

Ask whoever runs your site. There are two ways they can help:

• They can run it for you. If you want a course outlined or a set of lessons tidied up, the person who owns the course can do that with their own connection and hand you the result to work on.
• They can change your role. If you are in practice responsible for whole courses rather than for content inside them, being made an instructor on those courses may simply be the correct description of what you do. That is their decision, and it carries other responsibilities with it.

One thing worth knowing either way

If somebody with a connection has been working on a course you write for, nothing it did was invisible. Every change is recorded, and anything it wrote that needs a person’s eye — particularly a changed assessment question — was flagged at the time. If a lesson you wrote looks different from how you left it, the person who owns the course can tell you exactly what happened to it.

A connection cannot delete anything. If content of yours has gone missing, an AI assistant is not the explanation — it has no way to remove a lesson, a module or a course.