What do you know about ChatGPT?

A recent meeting of the National CTC’s BILT (Business and Industry Leadership Team) featured a presentation from Miami Dade College faculty member George Gabb on ChatGPT, the advanced natural language processing AI model developed by OpenAI that uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like text.  To train this model took as much power as needed to power San Francisco for a year.  ChatGPT’s “pros” include: the ability to generate text from prompts with limited information; creating complete sentences and ideas; generating content with limited vocabulary; and providing a response based on a single prompt.  Learn more here.

Below are a few highlights from his presentation and the discussion with meeting attendees, which included both educators and IT industry employers.

* Educators may need to embrace ChatGPT. Educators are worried about ChatGPT’s ability to support cheating and plagiarism. Companies like TurnItIn are working on new systems to identify ChatGPT-created content, but it won’t be perfect; this is another battle in the ongoing “Cold War” between plagiarism/cheating and academic integrity. Several educators are dealing with this by openly building it into the classroom. If this tool is in the workplace, shouldn’t students learn how to use it responsibly? For a programming class test, the instructor asks to not only see the code but also the ChatGOT prompt used to create the code because students still need to understand what underlying elements make the code work.  Further reading via Forbes.com.

* ChatGPT has the potential for huge disruption. Experts thought lower-level jobs would be the only ones replaced by machine learning and artificial intelligence tools, it looks now like could replace marketing jobs and other similar jobs that are typically reserved for human creatives. Further reading via Wired.com.

* “Prompt engineering” and “fine tuning” are new specialized skills. While ChatGPT is powerful, users need to know how to create queries and write prompts to get the results they need. Knowing just how to do that may soon become a vital skill for business professionals.  Further reading via Axios.

A version of this blog post can be downloaded here.  For a deeper dive, read the February 2023 BILT meeting minutes, which can be accessed for free here: https://nationalctc.nationalctcwiki.org/bilt.