In case you missed it, Hannah Rozear (Duke Librarian for Biological Sciences & Global Health) gave a talk this week entitled ChatGPT for Academic Research: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (watch here). Here’s my summary:
The Good: ChatGPT has the potential to:
- accelerate your writing by
- automating rote tasks (like writing the acknowledgements)
- generating suggestions for better wording (like for article titles)
- generate keywords and topic ideas (especially helpful for novices in a field)
- improve writing by suggesting edits to your writing. It is very good at editing for
- conciseness
- organization
- …but it sometimes changes the meaning so these edits should be taken as suggestions only
The Bad: GPT-4: AI does not have a way to access or search specific copyrighted or paywalled content on-demand. The AI model does not reproduce the entirety of copyrighted works or paywalled content but rather synthesizes the patterns and knowledge it has gained from various sources to generate human-like text.
The Ugly: Despite GPT-4’s capabilities, it maintains a tendency to:
- make up facts and nonsensical content
- double-down on incorrect information
- perform tasks incorrectly
- share your search history with strangers
What you can do to keep up…
- PLAY with ChatGPT
- TALK to your students and colleagues
- READ/LISTEN/ ATTEND events (like this one sponsored by DLI)
- EMBRACE & ADVOCATE for AI/algorithm literacy
