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Generative AI CU Boulder

Introduction

To explore how to responsibly and ethically use AI tools in your study, here are some crucial steps to consider:

  1. Consult with Your Instructors:
    • Why? Policies vary across courses, and instructors may have specific guidelines regarding use of AI tools.
    • Action: Always seek their approval before integrating AI into your assignments.
  2. Explore AI Capabilities:
    • Why? AI tools come in diverse flavors—some excel at specific tasks while others fall short.
    • Action:  experiment and try to understand what these AI tools can achieve and where they might outperform traditional methods.
  3. Critical Analysis Matters:
    • Why? AI isn’t infallible; it can harbor biases and potentially spread misinformation sometimes.
    • Action:  Scrutinize AI-generated results. Be a discerning evaluator.

Tools

In 2023, the chatbot landscape changed forever. Chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google’s Gemini (formerly known as Bard) ignited an era of conversational marvels. These generative AI models are powered by large-scale language models that promise to automate tasks previously reserved for human creativity - writing, graph creation, data analysis, and more.

How ChatGPT Works | Chatbots vs. Search Engines | What is ChatGPT Good for | Prompt ChatGPT Effectively

 

How ChatGPT Works

ChatGPT is a chatbot that generates human-like responses to text-based conversations using a large language model based on the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) architecture. The language model is trained on vast amounts of internet text, learns to predict the next word in a sentence based on probability, from which it generates human-like responses.

 

Chatbots vs. Search Engines

It's important to realize that AI chatbots such as ChatGPT operate in a very different way than the search engines and retrieval systems we use to find resources (such as library catalogs, database search functions, or Google Scholar). Search engines help users find information that already exists in documents and publications by recognizing words or phrases in search terms, finding existing resources that match those terms, and applying sorting algorithms to determine the most relevant results to your search. Chatbots, whether connected to the web or not, do not perform match searches on existing text; they are not designed to find existing text. Instead, they create new conversation-like text in response to the prompts you entered. They work by predicting the next word in a given text based on patterns learned from large amounts of training data. However, generative AI technology seems destined to be integrated into search engines and retrieval systems very soon.

 

What is ChatGPT Good For

ChatGPT has a diverse array of promising applications to support your study and research. The following examples demonstrate use cases where ChatGPT can be used as an effective tool. Yet, keep in mind that there are many more additional instances to explore depending on your familiarity and understanding of how ChatGPT works.

  • Writing Assistance: ChatGPT can provide feedback on your work and help you revise your writing. You may ask ChatGPT to improve clarity, adjust work count, or adapt content for a different audience.
  • Brainstorming: ChatGPT can brainstorm ideas, topics, research questions, examples, arguments, or relevant keywords for searching in scholarly databases.
  • Translating: You may ask ChatGPT to translate texts to different languages.
  • Language tutor: You can let ChatGPT be your language tutor and hone your language skills by asking it to explain words, phrases or provide examples of usage, explaining concepts for deeper understanding.

Once you have a general understanding of how ChatGPT operates, you will realize its potential for accomplishing a variety of tasks. It is beneficial to learn from the suggestions and experiences of others, for example, the 25 ways for students to use ChatGPT 

25 ways for students to use ChatGPT

Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that ChatGPT has its limitations and that there are questions about how to use it properly to maximize the tool's potential It is recommended that you look at the use cases critically, and carefully tailor its use to your specific needs, as well as consider strategies for getting the best out of ChatGPT by effectively prompting it.

 

Prompt ChatGPT Effectively

Crafting an appropriate prompt is essential for harnessing ChatGPT’s capabilities and tailoring its responses to specific needs. There are strategies and tactics for getting better results from chatbots like ChatGPT. 

  • Write clear instructions: provide context of your request; tell the model who you are and what you want to do for which audiences;
  • Provide simple requests: break complex tasks into simpler subtasks; use separators to represent different parts of the inputs; offer examples 
  • Make it "conversational": examine the output each time and modify your request accordingly

AI Prompt Engineering

YouTube videos that demonstrate prompting strategies:

OpenAI Developer Platform provides a list of prompt examples for a variety of topics, such as grammar correction, keyword extract, python bug fix, translation, and more.

Before you use AI-generated images there are a few things to consider.

  • AI-generated images are not protected under copyright.
  • Many artists and creators feel the use of AI-generated images is not ethical
  • There are current lawsuits against companies producing AI-generated images that may effect how they can be used
  • Images created by these services may be biased or inaccurate

Translation Tools

Chatbots based on Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT and Claude, have become powerful tools for performing translation tasks. Other AI-powered translation tools have also gained popularity due to their effectiveness and exceptional proficiency.

Challenges and Limitations

  • Mistranslation: mistranslation often happens when you have misspelled words, colloquial expressions, ambiguous terms, or multilingual phrases in your input.
  • Inaccuracy: AI-powered translation tools are unable to accurately translate content from specialized areas that they have never been sufficiently trained in. They may have difficulty in capturing the rich linguistic or cultural nuances of creative works such as poetry to produce the best results.
  • Linguistic bias: the coverage of Large Language Models exhibits a notable disparity across various languages. They tend to excel in languages that are widely used and rich in online content, such as English, Chinese, and Spanish. They may not perform well in many languages with smaller speaker populations or less online content.

Suggestion

It's best to err on the side of caution, always check the results, and use AI-powered translation tools as an aid to your own translation work rather than relied on them exclusively.

Here are several tools for article discovery, summary, and visualization. Each tool has different strengths and capabilities.

Artificial-intelligence search engines wrangle academic literature (Amanda Heidt; Nature, August 2023) is an excellent introduction to AI powered article search tools.

 

Sources