Generative AI: A Student's Guide

ChatGPT: What is It Good for; What is It Not Good for?

Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things ups (known as "hallucination.")

What is it good for?

• Brainstorming ideas for research topics.
• Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
• Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand
• Summarizing and outlining
• Asking questions (be sure to fact check the results) 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

What is it not so good for?

• 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; remember it is simply predicting the order of words relevant to your prompt, and based on its training.
• Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use Library search, Library databases, or Google Scholar. This may change in the future with more specialized search tools based on LLMs. 

Understanding Prompting

What is prompting?

• Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.

The way you prompt makes a huge difference in the output that ChatGPT gives you. So it's worth learning some tips.

Always verify the information it gives you.

• Think of ChatGPT as your personal intern. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.

ChatGPT sometimes makes things up. 

• That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It is not designed to know facts. It predicts the order of words in natural human language based on its training, and our prompts.

Tips for writing effective prompts

1. Give it some context or a role to play.
2. Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results presented to you. Do you want an outline? A summary? A letter? 
3. Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways until it meets your needs.
4. Some people claim that we get better results when we are polite. Consider prompting with "hello", "please", and "thank you". (And this could be a valuable habit to get into as gAI and AI becomes more and more advanced.)

Examples

1. A role 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.
    
2. Example prompt:
   Please 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.
    
3. Example of changes: (keep conversing until you get something useful)
   Thank you. 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.

The Technology Behind ChatGPT

It's important for both students and faculty to understand generative AI enough to be able to understand what it's good for, what it's not good for, and how to use if effectively. Here is a self-paced online course to learn about the basics of  the technology of ChatGPT specifically.

Using ChatGPT Effectively