Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Although the ban on ChatGPT in colleges and universities has been gradually relaxed, and professors have begun to use ChatGPT to improve their work efficiency, it is still a secret to use AI to assist in work.

ChatGPT has received mixed reviews in the educational world. Teachers think that AI makes their homework meaningless, while students think that they are also meaningless homework, so it is better to let AI write them to save time.

Recently, however, things may have been reversed, except that the protagonist of the story has shifted from "student cheating" to "professors improve work efficiency".

Recently, Ian Bogost, a professor, author and game designer at the School of computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote an article. After interviewing several college professors, he found that ChatGPT is indeed a productivity tool for professors, and writing letters of recommendation and syllabus can get twice the result with half the effort.

Even one professor used a template letter of recommendation written by ChatGPT to reverse it and wrote a "most humane letter of recommendation" and helped students win a Cambridge scholarship.

However, with regard to the issue of letters of recommendation, some netizens left a message saying that they had already solved it and that they did not need AI at all. I was responsible for the recommendation and the students were responsible for writing it.

Since the birth of ChatGPT, colleges and universities have successively launched a killing order against ChatGPT, as if it was a dark cloud hanging over the educational circle, and many bad comments such as "the death of college papers", "the end of senior high school English", "students' homework are all written by AI" and so on.

Some universities have launched a survey of ChatGPT, updated academic integrity warnings in the syllabus, and even launched special courses to discuss.

However, as the disadvantages of ChatGPT are gradually exposed, these professors are no longer concerned about "cheating" and are more concerned about how to use ChatGPT to automate their tasks.

Large language models may be quite useless in generating "accurate facts and knowledge", but they are very good at solving tasks that have nothing to do with work output and can give very reasonable output.

On tasks that are highly repetitive and unimportant, ChatGPT unites student and faculty teams on the same front.

Take the letter of recommendation as an example. ChatGPT can't explain why professors will (or won't) recommend a particular candidate for a particular role, but ChatGPT can provide detailed templates, and you only need to modify a few key information.

A professor at the University of Texas, who spoke on condition of anonymity, uses ChatGPT to type a draft every time he "gives a lecture" or "writes a letter of recommendation." he believes that this phenomenon is very common, but this shortcut may be seen as avoiding work, but with so much important work to be done, writing a letter of recommendation is destined to be a low priority, and ChatGPT can cut the time for writing a letter in half.

Matt Huculak, senior director of research services at the University of Victoria Library and a scholar who uses the AI writing tool, believes that academia has a dark secret and that most professors classify letters according to "excellent", "good" and "average" and then fine-tune and reuse them according to the specific situation.

But Huculak wanted to know whether the emergence of ChatGPT would put an end to this phenomenon, especially for "top" students whose templates could not be defined, so he did an experiment in which he asked ChatGPT to write a letter of recommendation to excellent students, but not as a template, but as a negative example, and Huculak began to write a very different, anti-formulaic letter of recommendation.

Huculak said that the process of writing was something he hadn't felt for a long time. It was a very humane and heartfelt letter of recommendation, with which the student also won a scholarship to Cambridge University (prestigious scholarship).

With this success, Huculak began to apply ChatGPT to his work and rewrite an anti-formulaic text based on the output. He thought it was very comfortable to "reorganize the material" and was no longer afraid of blank documents.

Stephanie Kane, a lecturer at George Mason University, agrees that ChatGPT perfectly solves the problem that everything is difficult at the beginning.

Every time Kane starts to develop a syllabus for a new course, she asks ChatGPT to provide ideas, "ChatGPT is a bit like a rubber duck that talks back." By explaining the code and documentation to the duckling, you can inspire and find contradictions. )

But Kane soon found that ChatGPT can not provide real books, papers and other real reading materials that exist in reality, but can only provide relevant topics or concepts.

Kane thinks ChatGPT is better than asking colleagues, at least it doesn't put pressure on colleagues. I can ask any questions without worrying about being called stupid or unprepared.

Both Huculak and Kane use ChatGPT to jump out of formulaic templates, but Hank Blumenthal, a filmmaker who has straddled both industrial and academic circles, hopes to gain some secular insights through ChatGPT.

Blumenthal didn't get an academic job in his field, and he wondered whether the statement of position he had asked for on diversity, fairness and inclusiveness was too unusual for academic taste.

He said, "my manifesto of diversity is about all the films I have made. I have hired blacks, Asians, women, diverse staff, directors and actors. But I think the school wants something else. "

As for what it is, Blumenthal believes that ChatGPT has the ability to help write the expected text without being based on its own pluralistic position.

Another US university professor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, admitted that he used ChatGPT to generate formal "evaluation criteria" (assessment criteria), which are now part of courses and degree applications.

The professor said the study was so excellent that it sounded like something that people who knew nothing about the field would want to hear when evaluating a course. The generated material is good enough to be a real proposal.

For large language models, it is generally regrettable that ChatGPT does not provide originality after being trained with piles of existing materials.

But professors are not often asked to come up with something really new, and most of the work they do every day is office work, such as writing letters, processing forms and writing reports, which artificial intelligence can do, or at least provide a sense of superiority over AI.

The same is true for students, who also feel overwhelmed and overworked: they are exhausted by the demands of different professors and do not fully understand the specific requirements; they are overwhelmed by tuition fees; they are confused about their future prospects and have to be tested by the transition to adulthood.

Students come to university first to gain university experience, and secondly to study and obtain certificates.

College lecturers may see class assignments as pure commodities and tainted by chatbot intervention, but students will see them as distractions that make them unaware of what they are going to do.

So in these respects, artificial intelligence only helps to remove annoying obstacles so that we can all continue to do what is really important.

Reference:

Https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-letter-recommendation-cambridge-scholarship

Https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/04/chatgpt-ai-college-professors/673796/?mc_cid=13009e4968&mc_eid=0119a1dd0a

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Xin Zhiyuan (ID:AI_era)

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