As you may well know by now, ChatGPT is an Artificial Intelligence language model trained by OpenAI to understand and respond to human language. Using a technique called deep learning, ChatGPT has been trained on vast amounts of text data to understand language patterns and make predictions about the meaning of new text. As a language model, ChatGPT can converse with people, answer questions, and provide helpful information in natural language, just like a human being. It can assist with various tasks, such as providing study resources, answering homework questions, and offering advice on different topics.
It can also assist in writing introductions… like the one you just read. Although I promise everything from here on out is written by the very human yours truly, ChatGPT’s skills and potential usages have shaken the academic world with its uncanny ability to formulate fairly eloquent texts. In fact, ChatGPT successfully passed tests typically administered to students at Wharton Business School and Minnesota Law School. While this may leave many businesses and law professors shaking in their boots, the good news for us is that anyone can now have a law student and a business student in their pockets at all times, ready to answer questions. So that brings me to this: ChatGPT may be a nightmare for Sentinel’s English department, but it can offer itself as a boon for students and professionals using it for benign purposes–like research. Allow me to explain.
When researching online, students and academics alike are inundated with hundreds of thousands of sources. From there, you parse through dozens of articles to find what you’re looking for, speed-reading articles until your eyes get red and blurry and you want to punch a hole through your computer screen. What if I told you that ChatGPT could offer you a helping hand–or in this case, a helping cursor? Let’s say you find an article that could help your inquiry question. A long article. A 36-page-long article (true story). Do you want to spend the next 30 minutes of your life reading it all? Not really. But does it contain potentially valuable information? Perhaps. In the past, we were left with two options. Either we read and suffer through all 36 pages of highbrow scientific prose and try valiantly to wrap our brains around its contents, or… we give up and move on. But now we have a third option: paste the text into ChatGPT, and ask it for a succinct summary. Soon you’ll find yourself reading two pages instead of 36, and therefore having time to find five good articles to support your claims instead of the one. Of course, don’t go pasting all of Animal Farm into ChatGPT to get a summary for your essay in Mr. Beetlestone’s grade 10 English class, but when warranted, ChatGPT can help you get academic research and writing done efficiently.
In sum, ChatGPT can help save time and increase efficiency in academic research and writing. It has the potential to be a great tool for students and researchers alike–if you ever find yourself writing an article about ChatGPT, for instance–but caution should be exercised to use it ethically and appropriately. In all seriousness, while the concern around ChatGPT becoming a method for academic dishonesty is by no means unwarranted, we can look simultaneously at this technology from a different perspective, and ask ourselves how we can use it to maximize the academic potential of society as a whole. If we are able to use this chatbot to streamline research and development, it can set us on a path of innovation and progress.
In the meantime, please excuse me while I go ask ChatGPT to compose a paean on the greatness of pineapples on pizza–now that’s some true innovation right there.
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