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Law Faculty Guide to Artificial Intelligence

What is ChatGPT?

Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, or ChatGPT, is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. It was designed to mimic human conversation, but has developed a broad range of functions. Chat GPT is a versatile program, with the capacity to debug code, compose music, and more!

How do I use ChatGPT?

To use ChatGPT, first you must create a free OpenAI account. Then you type in a question or request for the bot to process. ChatGPT analyzes your request to provide an appropriate response, based on the information it has available. It has been trained on a wide range of textual data: webpages, programming languages, and text databases from across the internet.

What can ChatGPT do?

ChatGPT can generate a wide variety of texts on a range of subjects. ChatGPT has been used to:

  • Write essays
  • Write news articles
  • Craft legal research searches
  • Write blog posts
  • Write legal briefs
  • Draft legal memos
  • Create recipes
  • Write jokes
  • Solve math problems
  • Offer advice
  • Debug code

Are there limits to what ChatGPT can do?

ChatGPT makes mistakes, such as making up academic sources. It can also plagiarize. ChatGPT will respond to the same question asked multiple times with different answers; these answers are not always correct.

How can I detect if my students are using ChatGPT?

OpenAI has developed a new AI classifier to determine whether AI text from is different human-written text. Though the program is not 100% reliable, it will continuously learn to distinguish AI written text. This tool is free to use, but you must create an OpenAI account.

GPTZero is another tool used to detect whether an assignment has been generated using ChatGPT. Upload an assignment file, or paste the text of the work into the text box, and press Get Results. As ChatGPT grows in popularity, it is likely that other programs will become available for this purpose. 

GPTZero works by analyzing "perplexity" and "burstiness", on the premise that human writers write in a way that an AI will determine is more complex than another AI's writing; this is how it detects discrepancies.

 

What can I do with ChatGPT?

You can use ChatGPT to help you do a variety of class-related activities, such as:

  • Draft a syllabus
  • Write tests or quizzes 
  • Design a rubric
  • Draft emails to students
  • Provide writing samples
  • Draft directions
  • Draft abstracts

Where can I learn more about ChatGPT?

You can learn more by visiting OpenAI's ChatGPT FAQ.