Utilising AI & ChatGPT for learning and assignments

A talk was organised by UTAR Centre for Foundation Studies of Sungai Long on 4 August 2023 at KB 103 and via Microsoft Teams. The attendees were enlightened by the invited speaker, Ms Toh Kue Chin, who spoke on “AI & ChatGPT: Transforming University Learning and Assignments”.

The objective of the talk was to allow participants to identify key AI concepts and their future impacts; generate diverse contents using prompts and transform them into various formats; summarise essential learning concepts with ChatGPT, and utilise ChatGPT assistance for efficient research and completion of assignments.

Ms Toh is an HRD Corp Certified trainer, who has over 22 years of career experience in introducing new technologies and applications to people. Ms Toh also has a Master of Business Administration, International Business degree from the University of Malaya.

She started the talk with a brief introduction about herself. Defining Artificial Intelligence (AI), she explained that the AI machine looks like a human because it has a brain that can learn, solve problems and recommend decision-making. She later explained the role of data scientists and their job scopes, which included providing training to machines, designing rules and models for the machines to understand data and generating information for users.

Next, she talked about ChatGPT, explaining that GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer. Due to its deep understanding of human language patterns and grammar, ChatGPT can engage in conversations, answer questions and generate text responses. According to her, ChatGPT is the first robot in the world that is very much like a human. She said, “Last month, ChatGPT exceeded one billion subscribers.”

Moving on, she conducted some hands-on activities with the participants to allow them to better understand ChatGPT. She started by asking participants to log into their ChatGPT account. Later, she guided the participants to use the basic user interface while also explaining the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT. She then did a demonstration of the ChatGPT and asked participants to test it on their laptops. She also guided students on how to utilise ChatGPT for their assignments.

Elucidating on biasness, she explained why it matters to students. She mentioned that all decision-making, such as hiring or university intake, will be made by AI in the future. Automated decisions will be more significant; therefore, regulations were necessary to prevent unfair outcomes. She also explained about disinformation and fake news. According to her, it was becoming harder to tell what was real and what was fake with people utilising technology to spread lies and false information.

Ms Toh ended her talk with a quote stating, “I always think that technology and connectivity will help to improve everybody’s life”.

A picture of Ms Toh (top right corner) delivering her talk