Skip to Main Content

AI Literacy in the Age of ChatGPT (Faculty Guide )

Faculty can use this guide to explore issues surrounding teaching and generative artificial intelligence

What is ChatGPT Good For and Not Good For?

Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things up (known as "hallucination.")

What is it good for?

  • Brainstorming ideas
  • Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
  • Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand
  • Summarizing and outlining
  • Asking questions (be sure to fact check the results) You can ask a million questions without fear of being judged.
  • Translating text to different languages (not completely fluent in every language)
  • Helping write or debug computing code

What is it not so good for?

Become Skilled at Writing Prompts

What is a prompt?

In generative AI, a prompt is the input — such as text, an image, or instructions — given to an AI model to guide and shape the content it generates in response. When you provide this input, you’ll learn how to have conversations similar to human interactions and critique the results carefully. These back-and-forth exchanges with the AI model will produce the best results.

5 guidelines for a good prompt

  1. Use correct spelling and grammar. Write complete sentences.
  2. Be clear, specific and detailed about your request to the AI.
  3. Provide context and perspective to focus the AI output.
  4. Break down complex tasks into multiple short prompts.
  5. Specify the desired format, tone and style of the output.

Key elements of an effective AI prompt

* Based on a model developed by AI engineer Ben Hylak and endorsed by OpenAI President Greg Brockman 

 

State your goal EXAMPLE PROMPT
I am presenting to a group of college students about ethical issues related to artificial intelligence. I need help identifying and organizing ideas. 
Provide task instructions and form of output  Identify the most important ethical issues related to AI. Create a list of 8-10 key points to make, with several bullets for each point explaining its importance. Cross-reference your recommendations with classical principles of ethics and draw connections between those principles and emerging AI technologies. Suggest visuals for the presentation. 
Give any constraints, warnings and verification requirements  Use the points in my attached paper. Provide links to all sources. Draw material from respected academic publications only. 
Provide background and context (include as much as you can)  For context: I have been studying AI ethics and have written the attached paper. I now need to explain these issues in a 15-minute oral presentation. The students have only general knowledge about AI and most have not studied ethical matters. 
Optional: Specify the role the AI should play  In providing your list, consider yourself to be the presenter, who is a college-aged student very close in age to the audience. 
Optional: Provide examples for the AI to follow  I have created a start on the presentation and have attached that to this prompt. Please provide a critique of my ideas so far.
Detailed prompts produce better results

Examples:
 

Poor prompt

Give me an idea for a service project.

Better prompt

I am a student assigned to work with my class members on a community project to help those who lack housing. What ideas do you have? 

Effective prompt

I have been assigned to work with members of my college sociology class on a community project to help those who lack housing. Suggest three practical projects my group of five students could complete in nine weeks, describe what steps and resources each project would require, and explain what the group would learn in the process. 

More Tips for ChatGPT

  1. Sometimes it gets confused if you change topics in the middle of a conversation. When you want to change the subject, start a new chat.
     
  2. It will remember what you've said in the course of a conversation, so you don't have to repeat everything again. Just continue like you're talking to your intern.
     
  3. Don't ask ChatGPT (free version) for a list of sources. It will make them up. Instead use the library catalog, library databases, or Google Scholar. See I can’t find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
     
  4. Choose an output format. In addition to paragraphs it can give you a table, a bulleted list, ascii art, multiple choice quiz questions, emojis, computer code, and more.
     
  5. In ChatGPT you can see a history of your conversations and in the settings you can delete your history and turn off the saving of future history. You can also export your history and save it on your own computer.
     
  6. Remember, don't enter any personal, private data in ChatGPT, because OpenAI may use your input to help improve the model. The free version is a research experiment.  If you don't want your data used to help improve ChatGPT, you can turn it off in the settings (which means it also won't save your previous chats for your own viewing).