A September 2024 study in Nature found that three popular chatbot platforms are "more inclined to generate wrong answers than to admit ignorance." And worse still, users are not fact checking answers at all, nor are they even spotting the falsities. Another reminder not to use chatbots for research!
Source: Nature.com
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a fact of life and has been for quite some time. It's only recently that we have seen it incorporated into apps for a mainstream audience. If you've ever used Siri or Alexa or if you've used a chatbot, you've used AI! Below are some FAQs that will help you get a better understanding of how you might use it.
Always ask your instructor about their policy on using AI for class assignments.
Q:What is AI?
A: AI is the use of computers to imitate the behavioral aspects of human reasoning and learning.
Q:What is ChatGPT?
A: ChatGPT is a chatbot and virtual assistant that uses a Large Language Model to sort and organize data and language into a desired length, format, style, level of detail, and language. It relies on input (prompts) from users and training on data and language to mimic human language patterns and generate responses.
Q: What is a Large Language Model?
A: A Large Language Model is a computation structure that is capable of generating language or other natural (everyday) language processing tasks. It is "trained" on massive amounts of data that it can use to predict language patterns in speech and text.
Q: Can I use ChatGPT as a search tool?
A: ChatGPT can generate responses to prompts, but it cannot search the web by itself. It is trained on a specific set of resources within a specific time frame and cannot "find" new resources that it doesn't "know" about. Its purpose is to put words/concepts/data together in specific ways based upon the likelihood that one word will follow another. It's like an autocorrect feature that can sort and organize complete sentences instead of letters! It cannot sort fact from fiction or find a reliable source, and so its responses to prompts may not be accurate.
Note: ChatGPT is now testing SearchGPT, which has web search capability - but it is only in prototype as of July 2024.
Sources:
Roumeliotis, K.I. & Tselikas, N.D. (2023). "ChatGPT and open-AI models: A preliminary review." Future Internet,15(6). https://doi.org/10.3390/fi15060192
Russell, S.J. & Norvig, P. (2021). Artificial intelligence: A modern approach (4th ed.). Hoboken: Pearson.