Generative AI and Chat GPT
What is ChatGPT?
Launched in November of 2022, ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI. ChatGPT responds to your prompts and questions in writing. It can learn a writer's tone over time, act as an interviewer, and produce many of the materials college faculty rely upon to structure courses and provide excellent instruction.
Think of Chat GPT like a very smart and knowledgeable language tutor. It has read and analyzed vast amounts of text from books, websites, and other sources, and it can use this information to understand and respond to questions and statements in a natural, conversational way.
When you ask Chat GPT a question or make a statement, it uses its understanding of language to generate a response that is as accurate and helpful as possible based on what it has learned. This can be incredibly useful for many different applications, from customer service chatbots to language translation tools to educational resources.
Overall, Chat GPT is a powerful tool that can help people communicate more effectively with technology, and it's a great example of how AI is changing the way we interact with computers and each other.
SMU Generative AI Policies
A group of SMU faculty working with the office of Faculty Success and the Center for Teaching Excellence developed three optional policies you can use to communicate expectations for Generative AI use in your courses. These three options have been automatically populated as selections in Simple Syllabus for your convenience.
Online Resources for Using ChatGPT in Your Class and Beyond
The following links will connect you with videos and articles detailing how you can use ChatGPT. Need a beginner tutorial? You'll find a great one here. Ready for something more advanced or developed specifically with university faculty in mind? We've got you covered.
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QUICK START GUIDE TO AI & WRITING |
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"Quick Start Guide to AI & Writing" |
BEGINNER'S TUTORIAL |
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ADVANCED TUTORIAL |
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FACULTY-SPECIFIC RESOURCES |
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"Elevate Your Teaching with ChatGPT" |
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WHAT OTHER FACULTY ARE SAYING ABOUT CHATGPT |
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CHRONICLE ARTICLES |
"ChatGPR is Already Upending Campus Practices. Colleges Are Rushing to Respond" |
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"Advice: Don't Write Like a Robot" | ||
"Opinion: It’s Not Just Our Students – ChaptGPT Is Coming for Faculty Writing" |
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"Faculty Members Still Aren't Sure What To Make of ChatGPT" | ||
EDUCAUSE ARTICLES | Educause polled members on their view about AI. See results here. | |
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES |
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GPT Tools: Protecting Privacy & Data
The expanding use, availability, and popularity of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines such as ChatGPT, Dall-E, Bard etc. generates significant interest and concerns for higher education. Along with these opportunities and concerns,there are some critical threats and important security implications that all SMU communitymembers should take into consideration when using GPT tools.
While SMU will continue to review and consider more specific updated policies as this emerging field grows, all SMU community members should be aware of following existing best practices for data and privacy protections when using GPT or any technology systems. Publicly available generative AI systems are not secure or private!
As general guidance, prompts/queries submitted must comply with the following best practices:
- Never submit any account information (usernames or passwords)
- Never submit any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) or other sensitive or confidential material
- Never submit queries or prompts that would lead to issues if they were to be made public
- Never submit anything that includes your own or SMU’s Intellectual Property(IP)
- Always follow the relevant existingSMU policieson Data Protection, Acceptable Use, FERPA, Academic Integrity, Attribution and Ethics
- Never use public Generative AI tools to train AI models for people/human subjects unless those individuals have explicitly agreed to such usage and that the use of the data complies with SMU policies
This guidance is intended to include not just ChatGPT, but to all Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI chatbots including ChatGPT, GPT-n/x, Bard, LLaMa, BLOOM etc.
All SMU community members are advised to take into consideration that all queries/prompts made to an public AI engine are collected and retained by the organization providing the AI service. Intellectual Property (IP) can be lost by inappropriate sharing.
All SMU community members are advised to take into consideration that AI models are designed to return responses that appear convincing, and all output should be viewed from this position and not as authoritative. LLMs have,in many cases,been trained on a large corpus of material, and as such there is potential that the provenance of material and data reproduced by the models may be obscure, carrying the potential risk of copyright or other IP infringement. All output must be independently validated.
These guidelines apply to public cloud-hosted Generative AI tools, Generative AI tools or AI models hosted by SMU researchers will provide their own security disclaimers and should be appropriately developed with SMU’s IRB’s policies.