Greetings! I am interested in starting a conversation around a fairly big buzzword at least in our world: chatGPT. For those not familiar, it is an artificial intelligence tool, specifically a large language model, that can process and respond with natural language text. I feel it is quite remarkable in its abilities and believe it will have an impact on education moving forward. Perhaps this will become a blip on the radar of life and our profession, but I don’t think so.
I plan to post some follow ups in this thread containing additional examples so as not to create a book on my very first post!
So, let’s get started and explore this tool a bit! To begin, you’ll need an account, which can be created at https://chat.openai.com. The tool is free, for now, but rumor has it we should anticipate it becoming subscription-based in the future. Once you’re signed up, ask it anything… and don’t be afraid to push back on its responses. The pushback is where it can narrow down its responses and really dial in exactly what you’re looking for. Interact with the answers… I think that’s where it becomes very interesting.
Warning: It’s not right 100% of the time. Perhaps we can use that to our advantage!
Example time!
I’ll start with a basic (non-educational) question that can easily be Googled: Can you give me a recipe for a basic loaf of white bread? It will gladly help in mere seconds - screenshot below:
Let’s interact with this response. I am going to ask it about using bread flour instead of AP flour. Notice I’m asking about AP flour. In its original answer, it referred to all-purpose flour. Its response:
Interesting! Sure, I can find this via Google, but this result comes back much more quickly. Let’s ask another question. Can I reduce the amount of sugar in this recipe?
I like it! I can interact with the original response efficiently.
So how is this better than Google? I won’t argue that it is or isn’t. I just think this interaction is compelling and worth further investigation. More posts and examples to come! I promise we’ll dial this into education soon.
December 16, 2022
So we can ask chatGPT for something simple like a recipe… but can it be creative, or at least fake creativity? How about if we ask it to write a poem? I asked it the following question:
Once again, in mere seconds, it produced a very usable poem:
The interesting thing about this is that any number of us sitting around a table could ask the same question and would receive a different variation of this poem. ChatGPT is not finding content on the Internet and simply returning the result. It’s not returning someone else’s work. This is actually a unique poem created on the spot. That starts to move the needle when thinking about the implications on our classrooms.
More examples to come later!
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