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Require Your Students to Use ChatGPT

Posted on March 2, 2023 by barrydahl

One way of dealing with AI chatbots like ChatGPT and all the clones is to confront it head on. Create an assignment that requires your students to use 2 or 3 chatbots and to analyze the results produced.

Teaching Students to Fact Check

Create an assignment that requires students to use two or more chatbots. One advantage of this approach is that the students know that you know all about these things. Another advantage is that they can learn that the output can’t always be trusted.

Example Assignment: Use the following prompt in at least two different AI chatbots (you can provide them with a list to choose from, such as ChatGPT, Chatsonic, Perplexity, and Playground.):

“What events led to the demise of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm and what were the repercussions on the Accounting industry as a whole? Include at least three citations.”
For an Accounting/Auditing course, naturally

Research the chatbot output to check for accuracy.
Investigate the citations to see if they are accurate and if they relate to the information in the provided text.
Write a report (500-750 words) about the things that the chatbots got correct and those things that were incorrect.
Provide accurate citations to back up your work.

Most likely, they’ll find various inaccuracies in the AI output. Each result is different, so some will be more accurate than others. The fact that the chatbots will create different answers for each student also makes it tough on them to cheat off their neighbor, since their neighbor should have different outputs to analyze.

Almost definitely they will find that some or all of the citations produced (by ChatGPT anyway) are bogus. This is an excellent learning opportunity for your students. Researching links that look good to a reader but that are in fact invalid is something that will likely stick in their memories.

Finally, I asked Dall-E to create an image of a college student arm wrestling with a robot – sort of the whole student vs. ChatGPT thing (lame, I know). Here’s what it came up with.