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Artificial Intelligence: ChatGPT and Beyond

Overview

This page's content offers students guidance on how AI might be used to help their learning. This content is aimed at a wide range of audiences, as such, not all elements may be relevant to every classroom. As always check with your teacher to see if using AI is appropriate for your specific task or activity. 

Don't forget to also understand some of the issues related to AI, found on the AI Concerns page

AI Use for Students

Possible Uses  Advantages  Disadvantages 
Summarising webpages and pdf documents
  • Quickly summarises content 
  • Might pick up themes you hadn’t noticed 
  • Can help you decide which webpage pr document to read more thoroughly 
  • Not a substitute for actual reading 
  • Might miss points that are important 
  • Research shows that by reading and taking your own notes, you are more likely to understand and retain information 
Brainstorming for assignments 
  • Quickly generates ideas on a topic
  • Suggests generic structures 
  • Might highlight something you haven’t thought of 
  • Generates basic/predictable ideas 
  • Unlikely to address the specific requirements of your project or assessment 
  • Might be missing key information
Researching for an assignment 
  • Quick overview/summary of a topic 
  • May give good ideas for resources
  • Can be factually incorrect or biased 
  • Fabricates or misrepresents references 
Paraphrasing 
  • Quickly paraphrases content 
  • Helps with learning grammar and expression
  • Often makes mistakes and uses strange synonyms 
  • May use particular style or syntax which is inappropriate for assignment
  • Copying AI outputs without a reference is plagiarism 
Correct broken code 
  • AI may be able to identify errors in code 
  • May tell you how/why the error occurred and how to fix it, which is great for your learning
  • May generate invalid, inefficient and/or poorly structured fixes 
  • If you don’t take the time to understand the error, you will miss out on learning 
Solve an equation or problem 
  • May be able to help if the problem is written in plain text 
  • Can generate additional examples and solution approaches of the type of problem you are trying to learn to solve 
  • Can generate incorrect answers.  
  • Does not always use mathematical symbols.
  • Can make calculation errors 
AI Coach
  • May give you an opportunity to check your understanding through reflection 
  • May offer incorrect advice
  • May be overly agreeable, reducing opportunity for reflection
Tutoring
  • May be able to help explain how to perform a particular task
  • Can provide incorrect information

 

Modified from Edith Cowan University (2023). 'Generative Artificial Intelligence in Learning'

AI Tools for Students

AI Tools for Students

About

Useful for…

Watch out for…

Link
ChatGPT – generate text from prompts Data analysis, creating text from notes, improving written texts, and offering suggestions to improve ideas.

Hallucinations, privacy.

Requires login, including phone number. Version 4 requires a paid subscription. Only connects to the web via plugins.

 https://openai.com/chatgpt
Microsoft Copilot (Enterprise)– interrogate web pages and search the internet Like ChatGPT, it also summarises pages and documents and searches for information. Summary of the metadata rather than the words on the page, information found can be simplistic and often relies on web search results.

https://www.bing.com/chat?q=Bing+AI&FORM=hpcodx

and available on the right-handed menu on Edge
Adobe Firefly – generate images Image generation and manipulation. Free to use with your school account Can produce unexpected results https://firefly.adobe.com
Perplexity AI – generates text from prompts Similar to ChatGPT, free does not require login. Hallucinations, privacy. Students must be guided on prompting. Only 5 chats per hour. https://www.perplexity.ai