ChatGPT has often been in the news in the past year. This was often negative. However, about one hundred million people use it every week. When ChatGPT came out, there were immediate concerns about its impact on various sectors, and certainly on our education system. The app can handle most intermediate-level tasks, so many people have wondered whether such apps have a place in schools. It has been some time since ChatGPT came out and there are many similar applications available today. So this is the perfect time to find out if we should really be worried.
The first concern I would like to address is that ChatGPT will do all the work for school and university students. We see that these chatbots can actually do a lot of work. This does not change the fact that students still have to check for themselves whether what they are presenting is actually correct. A striking example of this is what happened in the United States, where two lawyers blindly relied on ChatGPT to establish their precedents. However, the chatbot posted complete nonsense, resulting in both being fined for providing fake evidence. There will probably always be students who want to get off easy. The best advice I can give here is to ask students to explain their solution verbally and ask insightful questions. This way you can distinguish the students who understand the material correctly from the rest.
So we cannot blindly trust online chatting software. But how do we make optimal use of it? Here I offer some useful tips in our laboratory. For example, ChatGPT is very suitable for rewriting texts, creating summaries that describe something at a high level, generating inspirations, etc. In your daily life, you can use it to create a shopping list based on some recipes, to rewrite an email to your boss so that it looks more formal (and without typos 😉), or to request interesting places to visit on your next trip.
Planning trips and learning languages
Recently, several ChatGPT-based applications have been released that have more specific purposes. A chatbot that I personally admire for my work is ScholarAI. This allows me to efficiently search scientific papers and find relevant articles. It can also summarize the paper, help identify missing literature, and help generate useful new ideas.
If you need to prepare a presentation for work, Smart Slides may be able to help you. This plug-in can create a new slide deck, or help you change an existing PowerPoint file.
Other chatbots that are also worth having in your daily life:
- Expedia, which helps you plan trips to ensure you visit all the interesting places,
- OpenTable, which can recommend restaurants and also refer you directly to the booking site and
- Speak which can help you learn other languages ​​as a kind of tutor.
A useful plugin for anyone who wants to test these applications, but isn't yet sure how to best phrase your questions, is Prompt Perfect. This chatbot takes your question and turns it into a more comprehensive question that ChatGPT can handle better.
In short, for almost every task you can think of, there is a specialized chatbot that can help you complete it. These additional versions of ChatGPT are currently still shipped, but since these chatbots are so popular, there's a good chance you can find a free alternative online. So, definitely give chatbots a try if you get the chance, as they are very useful for some tasks.
