Released in November 2022, ChatGPT is a new artificial intelligence chatbot that can respond to questions, write papers, code, and more. Since its release, ChatGPT has generated a big stir in academia and forced higher education to reevaluate the future of tech in learning.
On February 1, Drs. Nicole Zeidan (Assistant Director of Emerging EdTech) and Steven D’Agustino (Director of Online Learning) hosted an info session for Fordham faculty and administrators that explains ChatGPT and its tangible and emerging implications on higher education. In their brief yet informative presentation, the duo introduce some key technology terms, explain how ChatGPT works, provide a ChatGPT demonstration, and answer pressing questions from faculty.
Key Terms
- Artificial intelligence (A.I.): Computers and machines that can perform tasks that would normally require human intelligence, such as understanding natural language, recognizing patterns, making predictions, and making decisions.
- Machine learning: A subset of A.I. that focuses on building algorithms and models that allow computers and machines to learn from data to make predictions or decisions.
- Natural language processing (NLP): A field in AI that deals with how computers can understand, interpret, and generate human language. NLP is about making it possible for computers to understand and process language in the same way that humans do. It enables computers to analyze and make sense of large amounts of text data, such as social media posts or news articles, and perform tasks like language translation, sentiment analysis, and text classification.
- Chatbot: An AI powered system that can respond to queries in natural language. An example of NLP.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer): An advanced A.I. language model chatbox developed by a company called Open A.I.
- Designed to understand and generate humanlike text.
- Can respond to questions, generate explanations, write stories, and more.
- ChatGPT is not a search engine. It will use a vast knowledge of understanding of language to provide you with an answer.
- The responses generated by ChatGPT are based on patterns and relationships.
- It learns from that large corpus of text data it was trained on.
- Can engage in conversation with people in a way that mimics human conversation.
Some Questions Answerd in the Presentation
- How was ChatGPT “trained” and are there any concerns about whether or not that particular database is biased or influenced in any sort of way?
- What is the use of ChatGPT in the classroom? I am open to having my students use chat GPT but I want to make sure my students are completing their own work.
- What are the implications of ChatGPT on peer reviewed research and writing papers?
Note: You may need to log in to Panopto to view the video with your Fordham username.