Why are people excited about these tools?

GenAI tools are great for some things such as comparing patterns and for putting concepts together in different combinations, which may lead to some interesting ideas. They can do both these things on a large scale, which can be a useful aid to the human brain. The tools may help us to get started on a task like writing a paper or a grant proposal or a teaching plan, in the same way as brainstorming ideas with colleagues might do. They can generate many suggestions quickly, which can help us to start thinking about the task.

They can also help with changing the tone of a piece of writing, selecting vocabulary which is better suited to a particular group, or writing from a particular perspective. They may be able to summarise long and complex document, or extract key content. They are able to generate computer code, and also document and explain it. All of these tasks can help people to understand techniques and processes more effectively.

We know that people will generally begin to use GenAI tools more in their future employments, and it is important that universities both prepare students for this and also discuss with them the ethics and implications of the use of these tools in the workplace. A randomised study of professional workers performing writing tasks showed that they improved their productivity when introduced to ChatGPT (Noy & Zhang, 2023), but the authors point out that their study raises a wide range of aspects we need to consider: how the workers used the outputs from ChatGPT (e.g as prompts or as finished products) and what impact this difference might have on future employment, how employers perceive effort, and what level of human judgement will be needed in the future, among other things.  These points are further developed in a study in which they asked experienced business consultants to solve a set of realistic tasks, with them randomly allocated to groups which did or did not have access to ChatGPT 4. Those with access were significantly more productive and had higher quality results on tasks which were considered to be within the capacity of current GenAI tools. (dell'Acqua et al, 2023 Links to an external site.). 

Helping students to use these tools in work-realistic situations will help them develop skills which employers are already asking for, and even more importantly, gives you a chance to discuss any ethical, environmental and personal issues which may be relevant to your subject area. For instance, AI tools are proving to be very good at analysing patterns such as microscopic photographs of cell samples which pathologists review for possible evidence of abnormalities such as cancer (Silva et al., 2023). A GenAI tool which has been trained on a variety of ways of explaining findings in simpler language could then be added to this to explain the potential diagnosis. Healthcare, law and ethics students could use this as a starting point for a discussion about the potential desirability of such a tool and what the benefits and disadvantages might be. Communications students could discuss how outputs would be best presented to patients, and computing students could work on designing the model and the user interface.