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Artificial Intelligence | ChatGPT for Instructors

Information on Generative AI for Instructors

Benefits & Drawbacks

Where ChatGPT is Helpful

  • Brainstorming ideas;
  • Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper;
  • Creating keywords for library database searches;
  • Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand;
  • Summarizing and outlining;
  • Asking questions.  You can ask a million questions without fear of being judged;
  • Translating text to different languages (not completely fluent in every language);
  • Helping write or debug computing code.
  • Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things up (known as "hallucination.")

Where ChatGPT is Not Helpful

  • Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use library databases or Google Scholar. Consider instead trying sites that summarize web search results with generative AI (ChatGPT 3.5 since it does not integrate current web search information):

     

  • Asking for any information that would have dire consequences if it was incorrect (such as health, financial, legal advice, and so on). This is because of its tendency to sometimes make up answers, but still sound very confident.

Prompting

Prompts Make a Huge Difference in ChatGPT Results

What is prompting?

Simply put, it's what you type into the chat box.  How you ask ChatGPT impacts the information it returns.  Experiment:  Ask it to write something on a 12th grade level, or a graduate level.  

  1. Tips for Writing Effective Prompts
  • Give it some context or a role to play.
  • Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results formatted.
  • Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways.
  1. Prompt Examples

A role prompt could be, "Act as an expert in [fill in the blank]." 

  • Act as an expert community organizer.
  • Act as a high school biology teacher.
  • Act as a comedian.

An example prompt:

  • Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.

Example of changes: Keep conversing until you get something useful...

  • Now give me some sub-topics or research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
  • Or...I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.

  1. Always verify the information it gives you.

  2. Think of ChatGPT as your personal intern. Like an intern, it needs very specific instructions, and it needs you to verify the information.
  3. ChatGPT sometimes makes things up. That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It's not designed to know facts.

More ChatGPT Tips

 

  1. Start a new chat if you change the subject.  If you change topics in the middle of a conversation, it may get confused. 
     
  2. ChatGPT remembers.    It will remember what you've said in the course of a conversation.  No need to repeat.  Just continue like you're talking to your intern.
     
  3. Don't ask the free version of ChatGPT for a list of sources. It will make them up. Instead use library search, library databases, or Google Scholar.  
     
  4. Choose an output format. In addition to paragraphs it can give you a table, a bulleted list, ascii art, multiple choice quiz questions, emojis, computer code, and more.
     
  5. View the history of your conversations in ChatGPT.  In the settings you can delete your history and turn off the saving of future history. You can also export your history and save it on your own computer.
     
  6. Don't enter provide personal or private data in ChatGPT, because OpenAI may use your input to help improve the model. The free version is a research experiment.  If you don't want your data used to help improve ChatGPT, you can turn it off in the settings (which means it also won't save your previous chats for your own viewing).