Using ChatGPT: �Strategies for Faculty, Staff and Administrators

Anna Mills, College of Marin

Recorded June 9, 2023 for the AI in Education: Unleashing Creativity and Collaboration webinar at the University of Kent

Licensed CC BY NC 4.0

What to expect

• Ground rules for using ChatGPT
• Uses
• How to get the most out of ChatGPT

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Slides available for commenting and sharing at https://bit.ly/UsingGPT

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

How useful is AI? �Quotes from a New York Times article by Francesca Paris and Larry Buchanan

Was that AI hype? Try and see.�Before we use ChatGPT, some caveats and ground rules

• Disclosure
• Privacy
• Verification
• Critique

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Disclosure��Rule of thumb: If you would credit a human for similar assistance, credit ChatGPT (and the unknown human authors it was trained on)

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AI text detection software isn’t foolproof, but remember that text generated by AI might be labeled as AI, sooner or later

• Students and teachers should assume that AI text could be labeled as such.
• As software and laws evolve, what’s not detectable now might become retroactively detectable.
• See slides from my presentation “Towards Transparency” for more on detection.

Don’t make it a secret

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Privacy: Don’t share sensitive or private information with ChatGPT, especially not student writing or data

From the OpenAI Privacy Policy

“We may use Personal Information for the following purposes:

• To provide, administer, maintain and/or analyze the Services;
• To improve our Services and conduct research;
• To communicate with you;
• To develop new programs and services…”

Image by GDJ on Pixabay.com

Verification: Check all ChatGPT outputs

• Only use it when you have enough expertise to check
• From OpenAI’s message to educators: “Verifying AI recommendations often requires a high degree of expertise.”

• If you don’t have the expertise, do you have another way to independently verify the output?
• Do you have time to evaluate the output?

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay

• Sometimes wrong
• Sometimes biased
• Always lacks real understanding

• Language models are designed primarily to produce plausible outputs, not true ones.
• Biases from all the text they were trained on are baked in, impossible to remove.
• It’s a statistical model of patterns in language; there’s no intention or comprehension behind the outputs though it might seem like there is.

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Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Wait, should we even be using ChatGPT?

Image by ElisaRiva on Pixabay.com

A host of other concerns surround the training and use of language models (See Teaching AI Ethics by Leon Furze)

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

I continue to wrestle with these questions, but I am using it (in limited ways) because

• I’m fascinated
• It’s useful
• I want to understand what my students have access to
• I want to understand how the writing environment is changing as professionals use language models more commonly

Photo by ValeriaLo on Pixabay.com

Using ChatGPT isn’t necessarily “phoning it in.” We can use it to help us think and to push our thinking, not to skip thinking

I first saw articulated this approach articulated by Kyle Booten, an English professor at University of Connecticut at AI FUTURES: An Interdisciplinary Conversation on LLMs and the Future of Human Writing

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Ask it for feedback--maybe not for direct revision

• Give it your writing and ask it what could be clearer
• Ask it how you could improve a grant proposal.
• Give it criteria for a funding decision, give it your ideas, ask it how they line up 
• Ask it for counterarguments or possible skeptical reactions so you can be prepared

Image by manfredsteger on Pixabay.com

Prompt it to reflect back and draw out your ideas

• Ask it to ask you questions to help you think something through
• Ask it to pull out possible main ideas from your brainstorm
• Practice interviewing by giving it a role as job candidate or interviewer

Image by Andre Mouton on Pexels.com

ChatGPT is designed to mimic patterns. Automate the purely formal…but check!

• Have it convert APA to MLA citations
• Ask it to clean up a transcribed talk or meeting notes
• Ask it to check formatting

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Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

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Here I explain what I want to know about Google Sheets data and ask for a formula

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Ask it for help matching specific formats and styles

• Give it an example or template
• Give it raw ideas and ask it to translate them�

• Course outlines
• Lesson plans
• Rubrics
• Grant proposals
• Reports

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Image by camellia_sasanqua on Pixabay.com

Ask it to help you identify discrepancies, like an auditor (see this sample prompt for a comparison of a state and local outline for the same course )

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Ask it for editing and style feedback

Sample prompt: “Does this email come across as friendly? List sentences that might be read as negative, cold, or hostile. For each, suggest a more friendly alternative.”

See an example of ChatGPT’s suggestions�

• Ask it to list and explain its suggestions rather than just making changes
• Give it a sample of the tone and style you are aiming for�

Don’t let it take control. Consider each suggestion.

Image by George Milton on Pexels.com

AI for Learning Designers by Dr. Philippa Hardman

• “#1: Use AI to Optimise Your Feedback”�Hardman uses AI to revise feedback on students work to be more positive and motivating.

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• “#2: Use AI to Optimise Your Learning Objectives”�She asks ChatGPT to use Bloom’s taxonomy and include “so I can…” statements with each learning objective.

Uses for Research: These apps build on GPT to help find and summarize sources

• Bing
• Elicit.org (shown on the right)
• PerplexityAI
• Explainpaper

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Cautions on AI research tools

• Sometimes the summaries of sources are wrong.
• Sometimes the system ”misunderstands” the question.
• Here Bing answers a different question than the one I asked. The links it gives are not relevant to my question.

Image by cripi on Pixabay

Techniques for getting the most out of ChatGPT

Image by kaboompics on Pixabay

“Prompt engineering”? It doesn’t have to be technical.�Just try! No arcane knowledge needed!

• When we want to get somewhere in conversation, we try things…
• We think about how to draw out our interlocutor
• We consider scaffolding to help the student
• We have these skills as educators, colleagues, and managers!
• Let’s be daring and playful 

Image courtesy of Shafin_Protik on Pixabay.com

Simple, but maybe not obvious

• Keep asking yourself whether ChatGPT is useful (sometimes it’s better to ditch it)
• Try again, or ask it for multiple answers.
• Tell it what it gets wrong; ask it to redo.
• Give it what you have to go on (bullet points, sources, text to respond to, examples)
• Take it step by step through a process. Ask it to explain its reasoning for each step.

Photo by Wes Hicks on Unspliash

You’re directing; it’s the actor

• Give it an example of the style you want:�“Can you make that more friendly?”�
• Tell it to play a particular role such as a coach, mentor teacher, executive assistant, or editor (see Rob Lennon’s post about this): �“You are a supportive editor.”�
• Tell it to be unbiased: �“Make sure to give an unbiased response.”

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors on Pixabay

Get ChatGPT to help you get the most out of it

• Ask it to check or give feedback on its own outputs: �“Are there any flaws in X?”�
• “How can you help me write X? What information do you need?” (Ethan Mollick’s suggestion)

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

More on getting the most out of ChatGPT and other AI systems

• Practical Strategies for ChatGPT in education
• ChatGPT CheatSheet from QuickRef.me
• Ethan Mollick’s How to Use AI to Do Practical Stuff
• LearnPrompting.org
• Prompt Engineering in ChatGPT: A Comprehensive Master Course

Presentation by Anna Mills, licensed CC BY NC 4.0.

Thanks for watching, and I hope you find this helpful!

�Anna Mills�annarmills.com

Twitter: @EnglishOER

Slides: https://bit.ly/UsingGPT��This presentation is shared under a CC BY NC 4.0 license.