Conversations about chatGPT have popped up so often that I don’t even bother counting anymore. However, I want to write about it today because I talked about it at least 5 times today in various classes and events and it’s a truly unavoidable topic in the academic space.
I am very impressed by the power of ChatGPT since it is great at answering most questions. It relies on the vast amount of data and information on the internet; however, as it’s only trained up until 2021 data it is unable to answer questions about current events, including the weather. I find this program helpful in brainstorming and creating ideas. For example, I am looking for a topic for the final of my Peace and Justice class and I am interested in exploring the relationship between Native Americans and technology. Instead of going on Google to read newspapers and research to form topics in my own words, I can ask ChatGPT. It can give me results in just a few seconds and they are most likely well-supported with evidence because ChatGPT was trained based on a dataset. Below are a few screenshots I took to better articulate my example.
Many of my professors agreed that this technology affects students’ critical thinking abilities and should never be used in education at all. I agree with this because chatGPT is trained based on the data provided, but it can learn and improve itself as it is fed more information. Therefore, it can give out both facts and made-up answers. If students aren’t taught to verify facts and think for themselves, they will fall into the rabbit holes of fake information. To partially tackle this issue, ChatGPT just released another application to help detect content generated by machines. It’s still in beta mode and not 100% accurate, so I think we still need more time to see how things turn out.
Lastly, I found this graphic on Twitter, which guides us to appropriately use ChatGPT and I thought I would share it here!
Trang "Tee" Nguyen 