ChatGPT and Writing
ChatGPT came out around the end of 2022. Later on, in the beginning of 2023, professors at school, when I was studying at university, started to teach us to use ChatGPT to ask some education questions, such as making a lesson plan. At that time, I was terrified that if I used ChatGPT for once, then I might be relying on it forever. So, I didn’t make an account for using ChatGPT. My teammate at that time made a lesson plan for teaching activity and we found out that the activities that ChatGPT provided us seemed fun. But when we started teaching, we found out many problems, such as the rules being too complicated or the content being too easy for students that they didn’t even want to pay attention. Start from that day; I don’t really believe that ChatGPT can help us solve the problems. Instead, I thought that ChatGPT was a “problem maker.”
When I was a junior, me and my teammate were working on our graduation project. We thought of lots of ideas that may be great to do the project. But our thesis advisor told us that the topics we thought were actually not going to be suitable. Then, the advisor professor gave us advice that we could use ChatGPT to get some ideas. But I still didn’t use ChatGPT to get some ideas. Then the professor said that she already provides us the “tool” to help us; it depends on us whether we would like to use it or not. Compared to others, my team was so behind in the project. I understand maybe technology can help us with the topic. But what I can say is that after I use ChatGPT to brainstorm the project, our project starts to become smooth.
Mostly, I use ChatGPT to help me brainstorm the idea or revise the writing. For example, I use the prompt “This is the abstract of the paper ‘Title of the Paper.’ Please help me check the grammar and sentence pattern of the paragraph. But please don't paraphrase the paragraph and don't write like AI.” After that, ChatGPT provided me a revised paragraph and also described each mistake with better writing.
Here are the two examples:
1. More Professional Structure & Clarity:
“The result shows” → “The findings indicate”
2. More Academic & Impactful Conclusion:
“underscores the importance of” → “highlights the significance of”
From both examples, I can see that the writing seems more professional and not like spoken language.
In conclusion, I don’t really love to use ChatGPT because sometimes ChatGPT provides wrong information. When I was going to apply for a master's program, I had no idea how to write a research proposal; therefore, I asked ChatGPT to give me an example. But later on I found out that the references are not real; I can’t even find the paper with the name or DIO. It seems that ChatGPT made up some research papers that do not even exist in the world. Also, there was once when I was testing whether ChatGPT could help me summarize the research paper. But then it turned out that ChatGPT provided wrong information, such as the number of participants and research questions from the paper. Therefore, ChatGPT sometimes can be helpful to brainstorm the idea, but sometimes it may lead you to misunderstanding the information that you would like to know.