"ChatGPT will redefine the future of academic research. But most academics don't know how to use it intelligently," Mushtaq Bilal, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, wrote on X.
Academia and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly intertwined, and as AI continues to evolve, it is likely that academics will continue to embrace its potential or raise concerns about its risks.
"There are two camps in academia. The first are the early adopters of artificial intelligence, and the second are the professors and academics who think AI corrupts academic integrity," Bilal told Euronews Next.
He places himself firmly in the first camp.
The Pakistani-born, Denmark-based professor believes that AI language models, if used carefully, can help democratize education and even make room for more knowledge.
Many experts have pointed out that the accuracy and quality of output produced by language models such as ChatGPT are not reliable. The text generated may sometimes be distorted, limited or inaccurate.
But Bilal says understanding those limitations, combined with the right approach, can make language models "do a lot of quality work for you," especially for academia.
Incremental encouragement to create a 'structure'
To create a structure worthy of academia, Bilal says it is fundamental to master incremental prompting, a technique traditionally used in behavioral therapy and special education.
It involves breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps and providing prompts or prompts to help the individual complete each one successfully. The clues then gradually become more complicated.
In behavioral therapy, incremental prompting allows individuals to build their sense of self-confidence. In language models, it enables "much more sophisticated answers."
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In his demonstration, Bilal started asking ChatGPT about specific concepts relevant to his work, and then about authors and their ideas, guiding the AI-powered chatbot through the contextual knowledge relevant to his essay.
"Now that ChatGPT has a good idea about my project, I'm asking it to make a sketch for a magazine article," he explained, before stating that the results obtained would likely save him "20 hours of work."
"If I wrote a paragraph for each point in the outline, I would have a good first draft of my article."
Through incremental cues, ChatGPT and other AI models can also help when it comes to "making education more democratic," Bilal said.
Some people have the luxury of discussing possible academic outlines or angles for scientific papers with professors at Harvard or Oxford, "but not everyone does that," he explained.
"If I were in Pakistan, I wouldn't have access to Harvard professors, but I would still have to brainstorm ideas. Instead, I could use AI apps to have an intelligent conversation and help me to formulate my research."
Bilal recently made ChatGPT think and talk like a Stanford professor. Then, to check how authentic the result was, he asked the same questions to a real Stanford professor. The results were astonishing.
ChatGPT is just one of many AI-powered apps you can use for academic writing or to simulate conversations with renowned academics.
Here you will find other AI-powered software that can help you in your academic endeavors, handpicked by Bilal.
In Bilal's own words: "If ChatGPT and Google Scholar were to marry, their child would be Consensus - an AI-powered search engine".
Consensus is similar to most search engines, but what sets it apart is that you ask yes/no questions, to which it answers using the consensus of the academic community.
Users can also ask Consensus about the relationship between concepts and about the cause and effect of something. For example: does immigration improve the economy?
Consensus would answer that question by stating that most studies have shown that immigration generally improves the economy, by listing the academic articles used to reach consensus, and ultimately by sharing the summaries of the main articles it analyzed.
The AI-powered search engine is only equipped to respond to six topics: economics, sleep, social policy, medicine, mental health, and health supplements.
Elicit, "the AI research assistant" according to its founders, also uses language models to answer questions. Yet the knowledge is based solely on research, allowing for 'intelligent conversations' and brainstorming with a highly knowledgeable and verified source.
The software can also find relevant articles without perfect keyword matches, summarize them and extract important information.
Although language models such as ChatGPT are not designed to deliberately mislead, it has been proven that they can generate text that is not based on factual information, and contain false quotes to articles that do not exist.
But there's an AI-powered app that gives you real citations to actual published articles: Scite.
"This is one of my favorite ways to improve workflows," says Bilal.
Similar to Elicit, when asked a question, Scite provides answers with a detailed list of all articles cited in the answer.
"Also, if I make a claim and that claim has been refuted or confirmed by different people or different magazines, Scite gives me the exact number. So this is really, really powerful."
"If I were giving a seminar on writing, I would learn how to use this app."
"Research Rabbit is an incredible tool that helps you track your research FAST. The best part: it's FREE. But most academics don't know about it," tweeted Bilal.
Research Rabbit is called 'the Spotify of research' by the founders and makes it possible to add academic articles to 'collections'.
These collections allow the software to learn more about the user's interests, giving rise to new relevant recommendations.
Research Rabbit also makes it possible to visualize the scientific network of articles and co-authorships in graphs, so users can follow the work of a single subject or author and delve deeper into their research.
ChatPDF is an AI-powered app that makes reading and analyzing magazine articles easier and faster.
"It's like ChatGPT, but for research papers," says Bilal.
Users start by uploading the research paper PDF to the AI software and then start asking questions about it.
The app then creates a short summary of the article and gives the user examples of questions they could answer based on the full article.
What promise does AI hold for the future of research?
The development of AI will be as fundamental "as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the mobile phone," wrote Bill Gates. in the last message on his personal blog, titled 'The Age of AI Has Begun'.
"Computers have not had the impact on education that many of us in the industry hoped for," he wrote.
"But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-powered software will finally deliver on the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn."