Mushtaq Bilal, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern Denmark, shared on X: “ChatGPT will redefine the future of academic research. But most academics do not know how to use it wisely.”
Academia and artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly intertwined, and as AI continues to advance, academics are likely to either continue to embrace its potential or express concerns about its risks.
“There are two camps in academia. The first are the early adopters of artificial intelligence, and the second are professors and academics who think that artificial intelligence breaks academic integrity,” Bilal told Euronews Next.
He places himself firmly in the first camp.
The Pakistani-born and Denmark-based professor believes that when used carefully, AI language models can help democratize education and even pave the way for more knowledge.
Many experts have pointed out that the accuracy and quality of the output produced by language models such as ChatGPT are unreliable. The text created may sometimes be biased, limited or inaccurate.
But understanding these limitations, when paired with the right approach, can enable language models, especially in academia, to “do very high-quality work for you,” Bilal says.
Increasing orientation to create a ‘structure’
To create a structure worthy of the academic community, Bilal says mastering incremental prompting, a technique traditionally used in behavioral therapy and special education, is essential.
It involves breaking complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps and providing hints or clues to help the individual complete each one successfully. Then the claims become increasingly complex.
In behavioral therapy, increased stimulation allows individuals to develop a sense of confidence. It allows for “much more complex answers” in language models.
In a thread on
Bilal started his demonstration by asking ChatGPT questions about specific concepts related to his work, then asked questions about the authors and their ideas, guiding the AI-powered chatbot through contextual information appropriate to his paper.
“Now that ChatGPT has a fair idea about my project, I want it to create an outline for a magazine article,” he explained, declaring that his results would likely save him “20 hours of labor.”
“If I wrote a paragraph for each point in the outline, I would have a decent first draft of my paper”.
Incremental guidance also allows ChatGPT and other AI models to help “make education more democratic,” Bilal said.
Some people have the luxury of discussing potential academic manuscripts or angles of scientific papers with Harvard or Oxford professors, but “not everyone can do 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 applications to have an intelligent conversation and help me formulate my research.”
Bilal recently made ChatGPT think and talk like a Stanford professor. He then asked the same questions to a real-life Stanford professor to check how real the output was. The results were surprising.
ChatGPT is just one of many AI-powered applications you can use to write academic papers or mimic conversations with well-known academics.
Other artificial intelligence-supported software that will help you with your academic studies, carefully selected 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 makes it different is that you ask Yes/No questions and provides answers to those questions with the consensus of the academic community.
Users can also ask Consensus questions about the relationship between concepts and the cause and effect of something. For example: Does immigration improve the economy?
Consensus will answer this question by noting that most studies find that immigration improves the economy overall, providing a list of the academic papers it used to reach consensus, and finally sharing summaries of the most important papers it analyzed.
The AI-powered search engine is equipped to answer just six topics: economics, sleep, social policy, medicine and mental health, and health supplements.
Elicit, which is an “Artificial Intelligence research assistant” according to its founders, also uses language models to answer questions. However, his knowledge is based solely on research, allowing for “intelligent conversations” and brainstorming with an extremely knowledgeable and verified source.
The software can also find relevant articles that are not perfect keyword matches, summarize them and extract important information.
Although language models such as ChatGPT are not designed to intentionally mislead, they have been proven to produce text that is not based on factual information and include fake citations to non-existent articles.
But there is actually an AI-powered application that provides real quotes from published articles: Scite.
“This is one of my favorite ways to improve workflows,” Bilal said.
Similar to Elicit, when asked a question, Scite provides answers with a detailed list of all articles mentioned in the answer.
“Also, if I make a claim and it’s rejected or supported by various people or various journals, Scite gives me the exact figure. So that’s really, really powerful.”
“If I were to give any seminar on writing, I would teach how to use this app.”
“Research Bunny is an incredible tool that FAST TRACKS your research. The best part: It’s FREE. But most academics don’t know about it.” he tweeted Bilal.
Research Rabbit, which its founders call the “Spotify of research”, allows academic articles to be added to “collections”.
These collections allow the software to learn the user’s interests and lead to new relevant recommendations.
Research Rabbit also allows visualization of the academic paper network and co-authorships as graphs, so users can follow the work of a single subject or author and dive deeper into their research.
ChatPDF is an AI-powered application that makes reading and analyzing magazine articles easier and faster.
“It is similar to ChatGPT but for research papers,” Bilal said.
Users start by loading the PDF file of the research paper into the AI software and then start asking it questions.
The application then prepares a brief summary of the article and provides the user with examples of questions they can answer based on the entire article.
What promise does artificial intelligence hold for the future of research?
Bill Gates wrote that the development of artificial intelligence will be “as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet and the mobile phone.” in the last post On his personal blog titled ‘The Age of Artificial Intelligence has Begun’.
“Computers have not had the impact on education that many of us in the industry hoped for,” he wrote.
“But over the next five to 10 years, I think AI-powered software will finally deliver on its promise to revolutionize the way people teach and learn.”