ChatGPT and Research: How AI is Reshaping Academic Learning

we have a new player on the field of Internet research enter artificial intelligence better known as AI now an example of AI would be a program like chat GPT this is probably the most prominent at the moment and so chat GPT is officially a language processing model that's trained on a large pool of data and basically in simple terms what it is is an interactive tool that you can ask questions you can give commands in which it will scan that large pool of data and intellectually process the information and then deliver it back to you

in a conversational medium this is a good example of disruptive technology disruptive in the sense that it is disrupting or transforming the industries that it applies to so as you can imagine this is digging up a lot of confusion or differing opinions among people so right now I want to say do me a favor go to the comment section let me know your initial impressions of artificial intelligence for Learning and any questions you may have and stick around to the end because I'm going to give you my unbridled honest opinion of what I think about

the introduction of artificial intelligence in the academic world so we have a general understanding of what chat GPT is on a foundational level it is just an information processing machine so it's changing the way we locate information how we comprehend information and also how we articulate information I've researched tons of things that we can do with this machine and narrowed it down to three pillars when it comes to the academic world number one it's a tool for comprehensive learning and research number two you can use it to synthesize or summarize content in number three yes

you can use it to create content number three we will definitely get into later on but first things first if you're new to this topic you can check out the free version of chat GPT go to this website right here it's super easy to use and quite frankly I'm going to be showing you how to do it so let's go ahead and move on now the way you communicate with a program like chat GPT is through prompting a prompt is what you put into the machine to get the response so it is the input that

determines the output think of it as marching orders it can be a question a command or even just a statement something to get the ball rolling so let's say you're researching software development specifically how to write code the way you'd get the ball rolling in this example is you might prompt chat GPT to Simply explain the concept of writing code once you receive the initial response this now becomes a matter of refinement meaning you're going to evaluate the responses and then refine your prompts to lead you closer to your goals your first refinement here might

be to ask for context so that's going to build on the definition understanding that you received in the previous prompt now you want to know how it applies to real life and check it out it's giving you an example of what it would be like working as a software developer so you decide that you like the example now your next prompt might be to ask for five more examples or perhaps you choose a different route let's say your understanding is still a bit hazy you can prompt chat GPT to give you a comparison or an

analogy now this is where chat gbt starts to get wild because check out the answer so it's comparing the process of writing code to the process of writing the recipe for a complex dish here's the thing I don't personally understand anything about writing code but I love cooking I cook all the time so this analogy it brings something like right writing code down to my level of understanding chat GPT is truly amazing in this regard and quite frankly this is leading into means of simplification so if we're to go down that route another really cool

thing you can do is you can pick personas on chat GPT so in your next prompt you might ask chat GPT to simplify the concept of writing code by explaining it to a five-year-old or even a fifth grader and matter of fact you can start with explaining to a fifth grader and then ask them to explain it to a college student this will give you a strong foundational understanding of that concept because you're layering on the knowledge researching and writing College papers just became so much easier but there's no sugar coating this and that is

that using artificial intelligence for academic purposes is going to impact your learning it's going to impact what you learn how you learn and how much of it you retain because quite frankly anything you apply artificial intelligence to is going to water down whatever that thing was an important part of our learning is processing information or going through a process going back to what I said earlier chat GPT is an information processing machine so yeah it is going to have an impact on your learning so quite frankly I'm not here to scare you I'm here to

emphasize that it's your responsibility to learn how to use artificial intelligence as a tool for Learning and not as a shortcut for doing but don't worry this is what I'm here for we're going to do a deep dive into the world of artificial intelligence for academics here on the channel next up we're going to talk about the foundation of prompting