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UNDERSTANDING CONVERSATIONAL AI FOR ACADEMIC SUCCESS

Presenter: Stuart Smith

These are the notes for the micro-teaching session 20/11/2023.

Learning Objectives

• What is ‘conversational AI'?
• How can I use conversational AI to help my studies?
• Considerations and ethical aspects related to the use of conversational AI.

What is conversational AI?

“Conversational AI allows human users to communicate with an automatic system using natural language.” (Ruane, Birhane, and Ventresque, 2019)

Examples

General AI Assistants

• Chat-GPT
• Google Bard
• Bing Chat
• Claude AI
• Hugging Face

Specialized

• DALL-E (image generation)
• Midjourney (image generation)
• Adobe Firefly [image generation]
• Stable Diffusion [image generation]
• Copilot [coding assistant]

Chat-GPT 3.5

• Free version with limits
• Access at https://chat.openai.com/

Can conversational AI help my studies?

1. Research Assistance: Produce summaries of long complex documents.
2. Writing Support: Offer suggestions for improving clarity, coherence, and overall writing style, acting as a virtual writing assistant.
3. Study Aid: Conversational AI can be a ‘study buddy’ and ask conceptual questions or seek clarification on complex topics.
4. Any others?

Writing Prompts

1. Be specific and clear.
2. Provide context.
3. Experiment with the length of writing.
4. Ask for a format, e.g., paragraph, list, etc.
5. Give some examples.
6. Refine - don’t be afraid to challenge the AI; ask it to clarify, justify, or rephrase.
7. Experiment with ‘open-ended’ and ‘closed’ prompts. Open-ended queries can result in more diversity in responses, great when looking for ideas!
8. Proofread, Revise, and check - never rely on the output alone.

Considerations & ethical aspects

1. Bias and Fairness: Can bias be eliminated in AI? What about cultural and language issues?
2. Transparency and Accountability: Students and researchers should be informed about the use of conversational AI in academia.
3. Accuracy: Conversational AI should not be relied upon to be accurate. References should always be checked and verified. AI systems have been known to have the right answer but make up the references!

Further Resources

1. Academic and Digital Skills Team: ils-ast@gre. (2023). Available at: https://docs.gre.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0034/319858/referencing-for-generative-ai-2.pdf [Date accessed: 19 November 2023]

2. Ruane, Elayne & Birhane, Abeba & Ventresque, Anthony. (2019). Conversational AI: Social and Ethical Considerations.

3. Freed, A. (2021). Conversational AI. Simon and Schuster, New York

UNDERSTANDING CONVERSATIONAL AI FOR ACADEMIC SUCCESS by Stuart Smith is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0