The future of academia could be transformed by AI language models such as ChatGPT. Here are some other tools worth knowing.
“ChatGPT will redefine the future of academic research, but most academics don’t know how to use it wisely,” Mushtaq Bilal, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern Denmark, recently tweeted.
Academia is increasingly connected to artificial intelligence (AI), and as AI continues to advance, academics will continue to embrace its potential or express concern about its risks.
“There are two camps in academia: the early adopters of artificial intelligence, and the professors and academics who think AI undermines academic integrity,” Bilal told Euronews Next. told to
He is firmly in the first camp.
The Pakistani-born, Denmark-based professor believes that if used judiciously, AI language models can help democratize education and even make way for more knowledge.
Many experts point out that the accuracy and quality of output produced by language models such as ChatGPT is unreliable. Generated text may be biased, limited, or inaccurate.
But Bilal says that understanding these limitations, combined with the right approach, can “provide a large amount of quality labor” for language models, especially for academia.
Step-by-step prompts for creating “structure”
Bilal says mastering step-by-step prompting, a technique traditionally used in behavioral therapy and special education, is fundamental to building a structure suitable for academia.
This involves breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps and providing prompts and cues to help individuals successfully complete each step. After that, the prompts become progressively more complex.
Behavioral therapy helps individuals build self-confidence through step-by-step prompting. Language models allow for “smarter answers”.
In a Twitter thread, Bilal showed how to use incremental prompts to get ChatGPT to give you a “great overview” of magazine articles.
In Bilal’s demonstration, he first asked ChatGPT about a specific concept related to his work, then asked about the author and his ideas, guiding the AI-powered chatbot through contextual knowledge related to the essay. .
“ChatGPT had quite a few ideas for my project, so I asked them to create an outline for a magazine article,” he explained, adding that the results could save him “20 hours of labor.” Declared there is.
“Just writing a paragraph on every point in the summary will give you a decent first draft of the article.”
With incremental prompts, ChatGPT and other AI models will also help “make education more democratic,” Bilal said.
While some can afford to discuss potential academic outlines and angles in scientific papers with professors at Harvard and Oxford, “not everyone can,” he explained.
“If I were in Pakistan, I wouldn’t have been able to reach out to my professor at Harvard University, but I would have had to brainstorm ideas. , helped frame the study.”
Bilal recently made ChatGPT think and talk like a Stanford professor. Then, to fact-check how authentic the output was, he asked a real-life Stanford professor the same question. The results were astonishing.
ChatGPT is just one of many AI-powered apps you can use to write academic papers or mimic conversations with prominent academics.
Here are other AI-powered software handpicked by Bilal to support academic activities.
In Bilal’s words, “When ChatGPT and Google Scholar get married, their child will be Consensus, an AI-powered search engine.”
Consensus is similar to most search engines, but differs from others in that it asks yes/no questions and gets answers based on the consensus of the academic community.
Users can also question the consensus about the relationships between concepts or the cause and effect of something. Example: Do immigrants improve the economy?
Consensus responded to this question by stating that most studies found that immigrants generally improve the economy, while also providing a list of the academic papers they used to reach consensus, and ultimately analyzing the main They responded that they would share summaries of relevant papers.
The AI-powered search engine has the ability to respond to just six topics: economy, sleep, social policy, medicine, mental health and health supplements.
Elicit, an “AI research assistant,” according to its founders, also uses language models to answer questions, but its knowledge is based solely on research and is a very knowledgeable and verified source of information. Enables “intelligent conversations” and brainstorming with
The software can also search for related papers with non-exact keyword matches and summarize them to extract key information.
Language models like ChatGPT are not intentionally designed to be deceptive, but they may generate text that is not based on factual information or contain false citations to non-existent papers. is proven.
But there is an AI-powered app, Scite, that provides actual citations to actual published papers.
“This is one of my favorites for improving workflow,” says Bilal.
Like Elicit, when asked, Scite provides an answer with a detailed list of all papers cited in the answer.
“Also, if I make a claim and that claim is refuted or corroborated by different people and different journals, Scite will give me the exact numbers. So this is really very powerful.”
“If I were to teach a writing seminar, I would teach you how to use this app.”
“Research Rabbit is a great tool to expedite research. The best part: it’s free. But most academics don’t know that.” tweeted Bilal.
Called the ‘Spotify of research’ by its founders, Research Rabbit lets you add scholarly articles to your ‘collections’.
These collections allow the software to learn your interests and present new relevant recommendations.
Research Rabbit also provides a graph visualization of scholarly networks of papers and co-authors, allowing users to track research by a single topic or author and dig deeper into their research.
- Chat PDF
ChatPDF is an AI-powered app that makes reading and analyzing magazine articles easier and faster.
“It’s like ChatGPT, but for research papers,” says Bilal.
Users first upload a PDF of a research paper to the AI software and start asking questions.
The app then creates a short summary of the article and provides the user with example questions that can be answered based on the full article.
What hopes does AI have for the future of research?
The development of AI “will be as fundamental as the creation of microprocessors, personal computers, the Internet and mobile phones,” wrote Bill Gates. in the latest post In a personal blog titled “The Age of AI Has Begun”.
“Computers have not had the educational effect many of us in the industry hoped,” he wrote.
“But I believe that within the next five to 10 years, the promise of AI-driven software to revolutionize the way people teach and learn will finally come true.”
