Chapter 7: Working with ChatGPT in Education

When ChatGPT was introduced, students were early users, and would use it to do their homework. Educators were quick to identify this homework since it often contained incorrect and repeated information. In time, it’s expected software will be able to identify ChatGPT-based homework.

The author suggests ChatGPT can be used to create an outline homework answers, which the student then checks and augments. Additionally, instructing students on how to craft a better prompt, to obtain a better response, will be a useful skill to acquire. Both these cases can involve the teaching of critical thinking skills.

Next, the chapter looks at how ChatGPT can be used by overworked educators. ChatGPT can quickly grade homework and offer advice on how to improve the answers – perhaps creating a mentoring plan. ChatGPT can also be used to quickly develop a lesson plan, which can then be augmented by the educator. These things should allow the educator to regain some of their private time.

A few ChatGPT add-ins are discussed (e.g. Duolingo Max), with the aim of showing how they might change how a subject is taught.

The chapter ends with the author stating that banning ChatGPT would be a mistake, since AI tools are likely to be an increasing part of future job roles. Instead, it can be used as a learning tool, and to gain a competitive advantage.

This chapter shows how ChatGPT can be used as a positive tool in education, for both students and teachers. It suggests some useful use cases. Personally, I feel if we can get the relevant professions to look at ChatGPT (including how to obviate its problems), productivity increases should abound.

Chapter 8: Using ChatGPT in Daily Life

The chapter opens with a look at the potential impact of ChatGPT on search engines. Search engines are driven by keywords, where the appropriate keywords should return the relevant webpage results. The use of keywords led to the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) business, to improve ranking and direct traffic to relevant websites.

The general usefulness of ChatGPT is likely to disrupt the current search engine industry. This is likely to increase as GPT incorporates fact-checking. We’re already seeing the integration of GPT with search engines.

With the incorporation of ChatGPT into many apps, the author posits it might become an all-encompassing super-app. For example, it’s suggested that existing virtual assistants (e.g. Siri, Alexa), incorporate ChatGPT, enabling them to become knowledge assistants. There’s an interesting look at how the Google search engine and ChatGPT respond to the question “what’s a good plan for a birthday party for a 12-year-old?” – with ChatGPT providing a much more comprehensive (and interesting) response. It’s likely that ChatGPT will change how you do your work, and how you make plans.

It's noted that ChatGPT can produce errors, this combined with bias (built into its datasets), can produce misinformation to support propaganda and conspiracy theories. And as stated many times previously, it’s imperative to fact-check any output.
The AI industry is working on ‘Explainable AI’, which tries to explain how AI arrives at its results. Hopefully this will allow the process to be tweaked to remove bias and correct any obvious errors.
The chapter ends with a look at the pros and cons of the convenience of using ChatGPT over search engines. In many ways ChatGPT gives you fewer options, with nothing about its sources, or if the information is current – however, several add-ins try to correct these concerns (and so does Bing).

Chapter 9: Recognizing the Ways ChatGPT and Generative AI Will Change the World

No one knows how ChatGPT will impact the future, but the author makes some educated guesses on some potential areas. Maybe it will take all our jobs and remove our purpose for living, or maybe it will improve productivity and make things cheap and readily available.

Its impact is compared with the introduction of newspapers, radio, TV, and the Internet, where each technology was expected to kill the previous one, but eventually the technologies lived together. Perhaps it will be the same for ChatGPT.

It’s likely ChatGPT will replace some jobs, but as with previous upheavals, other more interesting jobs may be created. Knowing how to use ChatGPT effectively is likely to increase your job prospects.The author acknowledges ChatGPT can rapidly generate and spread false information, but it can also create useful new information (e.g. stories, music, books, images).
Some suggested future disruptions include:

• Further loss of public trust (due to false video/voice etc)
• Augmentation of knowledge work
• Education changes
• Personalization of customer service
• Improved healthcare (e.g. giving doctors latest research results)

In each case, a brief overview of the change is given.
This is an interesting chapter, sure to make you think, and almost certainly make you want to make more use of ChatGPT.

Chapter 10: Ten Other Generative AI Tools to Try

The book ends with a look at 10 other generative AI tools to investigate, including:

• DALL-E 2 (create images from textual descriptions)
• DeepL Write (suggests how to improve your text)
• Notion AI (organizes all your work e.g. summarize docs, respond to emails etc)
• Durable (builds a professional website in 30s based on your textual description)
• God Mode (e.g. find the cheapest price for the best performing TV in the USA)

While not comprehensive, this list certainly shows the scope and potential of generative AI.

Conclusion

This book aims to introduce you to ChatGPT, and certainly succeeds.

The content is generally easy to read and interesting (the author is a journalist), with a good outline of what ChatGPT is, some of its uses, how it works, how to get more out of it, how it may affect certain industries, and its place in the wider world of AI.
That said, there are a few irritations. Some of the images are difficult to read, even when enlarged. Additionally, there is a degree of repetition.

The key to successful use of ChatGPT is writing effective prompts, and the book pivots around this. In many ways ChatGPT acts as a junior assistant, producing very useful initial results, but the output needs to be fact-checked.

ChatGPT is a rapidly evolving technology, and already the book contains some dated material (the book was released in May 2023). Currently, you might get the best results by using ChatGPT via Bing, since it can use more up to date information, uses the latest version of ChatGPT, offers references where it obtained its information, and can be ‘free’ (if you have an Office 365 subscription) – rather than pay the $20 monthly fee to OpenAI to use the latest version.

Some AI researchers have suggested ChatGPT, while useful, may ultimately be a dead-end in the search for true AI. Some of the problems with the ChatGPT approach, together with an alternative approach is given in an interesting TED talk by Yejin Choi with the title : Why AI is incredibly smart and shockingly stupid.

This book is a useful first book on getting to grips with understanding and using ChatGPT, and how it may impact the future. It is sure to get you thinking about how your life could be enhanced by using ChatGPT.