How do I use AI as a thinking tool?
We live in a ChatGPT world. Some argue that adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) and large-language models have emerged to make writing classes like the ones I teach at UCSD’s Dimensions of Culture Program (DOC) obsolete. Or have they?
If your goal is to produce some type of writing to submit to your TA, then ChatGPT will get that job done. But if your goal is to get a “good” grade on that writing, it’s probably a small chance that ChatGPT will help you do that all on its own. You can feed it a prompt but then you would have to know enough about the assigned readings and the prompt to evaluate ChatGPT’s answer – to know if it got the facts and details right and if it answered correctly according to your TA’s expectations. Hate to break it to you, but you still need to do some sort of thinking and writing even while using ChatGPT. And that’s ok. AI is here to stay, so let’s use your DOC classes as a chance to practice using AI as a thinking tool to produce written work with integrity and critical reflection.
First, a warning.
In DOC, you can use AI as a tool to help you with your assignments as long as you acknowledge and cite it ethically. Consult this APA guide to citation of ChatGPT to make sure you are acknowledging your use of AI correctly. Failure to cite ChatGPT and use of other AI correctly will result in an academic integrity investigation. Some other classes and professors, however, will have different policies regarding use of AI; some ban the use of AI completely. It is your responsibility as a student to carefully read and follow the syllabus and policies for all of your classes. At DOC, we want to help you learn to use AI ethically and part of that means knowing when it is allowed and appropriate to use in the first place.
Now let’s consider the uses and limits of AI.
Checking reading comprehension
The free version of ChatGPT is pretty impressive in its ability to collect and summarize information from the public domain to answer your prompts. In this way, ChatGPT could be useful to help test and reinforce your existing knowledge. Let’s say you read a particularly challenging text in class and you want to make sure you understood the main points. You could use ChatGPT to compare your understanding with what it summarizes on the internet about that reading. It can’t replace your own reading process though because ChatGPT’s answers are only as good as the source material it has access to, and there are many ways to read and interpret a text. ChatGPT usually provides the dominant or hegemonic understanding of a reading and in a course like DOC that emphasizes marginalized voices, this might actually lead to more confusion for you than help.
Starting an assignment
Everyone gets stuck when trying to start writing. The best help is always from your TA, peers, and lecturer because they can dialogue with you about the assignment, but you could also have a “dialogue” with ChatGPT as a way to start. If you were to input an assignment prompt into ChatGPT, it would spit out an answer that you would need to evaluate and edit to make your own. Remember that ChatGPT does not know who your audience is, the context you are writing in, or anything about your own previous knowledge or personal experiences with what you are writing about. The answers that ChatGPT provides are therefore usually very general, lacking citation or references, or any sense of a person’s voice for that matter. However, you could take the answer that ChatGPT gives and edit it extensively to make it your own. Basically, you’d elevate the machine answer and make it human. You would definitely need to “thank” ChatGPT in your acknowledgements page for helping you get started, and you would need to quote and cite any direct phrases or sentences you use in your writing that were originally AI generated, i.e. not your own words.
Mimicking standard academic English
The allure of AI is that it produces answers in polished standard academic English. And let’s be honest, it demonstrates a lot of privilege to be able to speak and write in standard academic English. It means someone must have had access to well-resourced schools, likely came from a family with relatively high educational attainment, and was probably a native speaker of English. Reading and writing “well” indicates racial and class privileges at the very least. ChatGPT can help students who struggle with standard academic English to approximate that way of writing and that comes with real material gains. However, as we’ll talk about in DOC 1, what gets lost when all of us start writing and speaking in the same way? What happens to the diversity of voices, differences of perspectives, and critical challenges to dominant ways of thinking if all of us just ChatGPT our way through life? I don’t know about you but that’s not necessarily the world I want to live in. AI like ChatGpt can have its uses but it also has its limits. Let’s learn to use it as a tool for thinking, rather than a tool that makes us stop thinking for ourselves.
Bottom line: be sure to dialogue with your TA and/or lecturer about your use of ChatGPT to make sure it’s actually helping you meet your goals in the course.
This was written by a human with the aid of google docs.