Connecting an AI assistant

You can connect an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT or anything else that speaks the same protocol — to your Grapevine site, and then ask it to read and write your courses in plain language. “Add a module on water safety with four lessons.” “Which lessons has nobody finished?” “Translate this course into Spanish.”

The assistant does the work through your site in the ordinary way. It is not a separate system and it is not a copy of your content: it is signed in, as you, with your permissions and nobody else’s.

What it is good at

• Bulk work that is dull by hand. Twenty lessons that each need the same tidy-up. A course outline you have in a document and do not want to retype.
• Translation. A whole course into another language, as a copy, leaving the original alone.
• Questions about shape. “Which modules have no questions in them?” is tedious to answer by clicking and immediate to answer this way.
• First drafts. An outline to react to is easier than a blank page.

What it is not good at, and should not be trusted with

An assistant does not know your subject, your learners or your standards. It will write a confident assessment question with the wrong answer in it, and it will do that without any sign that something has gone wrong. Everything it writes needs reading by somebody who knows the material — especially anything that will be graded.

Grapevine helps with this rather than solving it. When an assistant creates or changes a question, the reply says so explicitly and tells you to check it. But the checking is yours.

The shape of it

1. You create a connection key on your profile. It is shown once.
2. You give that key to your assistant, along with your site address.
3. The assistant connects, and is told what it is allowed to do.
4. You ask it for things. It reports back what it did, what it would not do, and what needs your eyes.

Start with Creating and revoking a connection key. Before you do, What an AI connection can and cannot do is worth five minutes, because several of the limits surprise people.

You cannot break your site with this

That is a design decision rather than a reassurance. A connection cannot delete anything, cannot publish a course for enrollment, cannot change a lesson students have already read, and cannot export everybody’s results. Those limits are in the software, not in the instructions given to the assistant — so they hold even if the assistant is confused, badly prompted or working from something it misread.

Connections have to be switched on for your network before a key will work. If you create one and everything it does is refused, that is the likely reason — ask us.