ChatGPT has created quite a buzz since its launch last fall, and has quickly established itself as a staple of everyday life. Despite concerns about the use of AI in academic fields, some university professors are now introducing classes and courses focused solely on educating students on the direct engineering and understanding of AI.
See also: ChatGPT now comes to Android
The rapid rise in popularity prompted Andrew Maynard, a professor at Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society, to offer a course specifically designed to help students get a head start with these emerging AI tools.
“We got to the point where it was very clear to me [that] there was a lot of panic, a lot of intrigue, and things were moving quickly,” Maynard told Inside Higher Ed.
In April of this year, Maynard offered a course now known as Basic Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT, which teaches students how to effectively create chatbot prompts that consistently produce desired results.
Adaptation for survival?
While there has been significant backlash in the education sector against ChatGPT, citing obvious concerns like plagiarism and cheating, the professors behind courses like Maynard's see it as an opportunity to prepare students for the drastically changing digital landscape created by OpenAI's ChatGPT and other AI tools like it.
Proposal: OpenAI launches custom instructions for ChatGPT
Jules White, director of the Future of Learning and Generative AI at Vanderbilt University, argues that “People say, ‘ Generative AI is taking your job’ – if that’s true, we better do something about it and make sure students are innovating and succeeding.”
It may seem like a counterproductive approach to concerns about how artificial intelligence will affect the future work environment, but the move to teach new members of the workforce to meet the demands and be “useful” in a world of increasing AI prevalence could actually mitigate any projected damage to the job market.
Interestingly enough, Maynard turned directly to ChatGPT to help him design his online course, although he also had professors and graduate students help him test and evaluate the content. The chatbot did play a significant role in the early stages of creating the course—while it makes sense for ChatGPT to explain how to use its own software, could this be the beginning of AI-generated curricula?
Read also: ChatGPT: Makes weak writers more productive.
information source: techradar.com
