Skip to Main Content

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Thoughts on AI Chatbots

What is ChatGPT? OpenAI's Chat GPT Explained by How It Happened

It doesn't really make sense to try and use ChatGPT as a source of reliable information for your assignment, project, or thesis because AI Chatbots were not developed to replace search engines or databases, and frequently gets basic facts wrong. ChatGPT was in fact developed to advance the field of natural language processing and AI using human-like language to chat with you while answering questions and generating content like computer code.

Chat GPT isn't here to ruin the world by Burton Kelso

Try to be critical when dealing with all GAI - always question the content as not all the information generated will be trustworthy. To guarantee a ChatGPT "hallucination", for example, all you need to do is ask it to provide a list of journal articles or books on your topic because the free version of ChatGPT is not even connected to the Internet.

Currently GAI (fee or free), whether connected to the Internet like Google Gemini (previously Bard) or not, are incapable of replacing your reliable library databases! Copilot (previously Bing) and Gemini may even suggest articles for you to read but these articles may not exist so you would need to check them all very carefully. 

Prompt Examples

Where AI Chatbots can be brilliant is when they are used as tools to save time by generating ideas for your research and providing help in other areas, for example...

  • give you ideas for your literature review outline
    • Prompt 1 - I am conducting research on [topic or clinical question]. Suggest an outline for a literature review that is divided into a number of different themes
    • Prompt 2 - Be more succinct

  • convert a block of your writing into suggestions for a slide presentation
    • Prompt - Create a slide presentation on [your text]

  • summarise notes you have written
    • Prompt 1 - Summarize [text]
    • Prompt 2 - Put this summary into table format

  • rephrase a concept or block of text to make it easier to understand
    • Prompt - “I am having trouble understanding [concept or text]. Explain this to me using simple terms and examples”

  • translate text into another language
    • Prompt - Translate to English [non-english text]

  • give you instructions on how to use programmes like Excel (although the instructions don't always work as they should)
    • Prompt - “I am having trouble doing [what you are having trouble with] in [programme]. Suggest a solution”

  • help you practice for an upcoming interview
    • Prompt -  Conduct the role-play scenario with me where you ask me a question and wait for me to reply. The scenario is one where I am a fresh graduate applying for a job as a [job type] with [company name and type]
  • help with coding (although you may need to tweak it to get it working)
    • Prompt - Create CSS code to apply a custom font to a webpage
    • Prompt - Create a Python script to automate a repetitive task, such as renaming files in a folder

 

Prompt Engineering