by “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, posted on X.
Academia and artificial intelligence (AI) are becoming increasingly intertwined, and as AI continues to advance, academics are likely to continue to embrace its potential or express concerns about their risks.
“There are two camps in academia. The first is the early adopters of artificial intelligence, and the second is the professors and academics who think AI requires academic integrity,” Bilal told Euronews Next.
He places himself firmly in the first camp.
The Pakistan-born and Denmark-based professor believes that if used judiciously, AI language models could help democratize education and even pave the way for more knowledge.
Many experts have said that the accuracy and quality of the output produced by language models such as ChatGPT cannot be trusted. Sometimes the text generated is biased, limited or inaccurate.
But Bilal says that language models can “do a lot of high-quality work for you” with an understanding of those limitations and the right approach, especially for academia.
Incremental tips to create ‘structure’
To create a worthwhile academic structure, Bilal says mastering incremental cues, a technique traditionally used in behavioral therapy and special education, is essential.
It involves breaking down complex tasks into smaller, more manageable steps and providing hints or tips to help the person successfully complete each one. The clues then get progressively more complicated.
In behavioral therapy, incremental cues allow individuals to build their confidence. In language models, it allows for “more sophisticated answers”.
In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), Bilal demonstrated how he managed to get ChatGPT to provide a “great outline” for a journal article using incremental prompts.
In his demonstration, Bilal started by asking ChatGPT about specific concepts related to his work, then about authors and their ideas, guiding the AI-powered chatbot through the contextual information related to his essay.
“Now that ChatGPT has a fair idea of my project, I ask him to create an outline for a magazine article,” he explained, before announcing that the results he found would save him “20 hours of work”.
“If I wrote an article for each point in the outline, I would have a first draft of the article”.
Incremental prompts also allow ChatGPT and other AI models to help when it comes to “making education more democratic,” Bilal said.
Some people tend to discuss potential academic outlines or angles for scientific papers with Harvard or Oxford professors, “but not everyone does,” he explained.
“If I were in Pakistan, I wouldn’t have access to Harvard professors but I would still need to brainstorm. So, I could use AI apps to have an intelligent conversation and help me formulate my research” .
Recently, Bilal made ChatGPT think and speak as a professor at Stanford. Then, to fact-check how authentic the output was, he asked a real-life Stanford professor the same questions. The results were amazing.
ChatGPT is just one of many AI-powered apps you can use for academic writing, or to mimic conversations with famous academics.
Here are some other AI-based software to aid your academic endeavours, handpicked by Bilal.
In Bilal’s own words: “If ChatGPT and Google Scholar married, their child would be Consensus – an AI-powered search engine”.
Most search engines seem to have a consensus but what sets it apart is that you ask Yes/No questions, and it provides answers to them with 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 found that immigration generally improves the economy, providing a list of the academic papers it used to reach the consensus, and finally by some summaries of the top articles he analyzed.
The AI-powered search engine is only equipped to answer six topics: economics, sleep, social policy, medicine, and mental health and health supplements.
Elicit, an “AI research assistant” according to its founders, also uses language models to answer questions. Still, his knowledge is based entirely on research, enabling “intelligent conversation” and brainstorming with a very knowledgeable and verified source.
The software can also find relevant papers without a perfect keyword match, summarize them and extract important information.
Although language models such as ChatGPT are not designed to intentionally deceive, they have been proven to generate text that is not based on factual information, and to include fake citations to non-existent papers.
But there is an AI-powered app that gives you real citations of actual published papers – Scite.
“This is one of my favorites for improving workflow,” said Bilal.
Like Elicit, when asked a question, Scite delivers answers with a detailed list of all the papers cited in the answer.
“Also, if I make a claim and that claim has been refuted or confirmed by different people or different journals, Scite gives me the exact number. So, this is really powerful”.
“If I were to teach any seminar on writing, I would teach how to use this app”.
“Research Rabbit is an incredible tool that TRACKS your research. The best part: it’s FREE. But most academics don’t know about it,” tweeted Bilal.
Called by its founders “the Spotify of research,” Rabbit Research allows academic papers to be added to “collections”.
These collections allow the software to learn about the user’s interests, prompting new relevant recommendations.
Research Rabbit also allows the scholarly network of papers and co-authorships to be visualized in graphs, so users can follow the work of a single topic or author and go deeper into their research.
ChatPDF is an AI-powered app that facilitates and analyzes journal articles.
“It’s like ChatGPT, but for research papers,” said Bilal.
Users start by uploading the PDF research paper into the AI software and then start asking questions on it.
The app then prepares a short summary of the paper and provides the user with examples of questions they could answer based on the entire 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 cell phone,” wrote Bill Gates in the latest post on his personal blog, entitled ‘The Age of AI Has Begun’.
“Computers have not had the effect on education that many of us in the industry had hoped for,” he wrote.
“But I think in the next five to 10 years, AI-powered software will hold the promise of revolutionizing the way people teach and learn”.
