Higher Education
A video on why students need to understand what AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude really know
Joe Kennedy talks about the importance of students’ understanding where and how generative AI tools get their information so they can recognize the limits, as well as the benefits,of what these tools can do.
Joseph Kennedy:
One of the ways to help students is to make sure they understand none of generative AI has a corpus of knowledge. Generative AI doesn’t know anything. If you ask ChatGPT, “Who is the first President of the United States?” It says George Washington because out of all the data that it is analyzed in 99.9% of them, the phrase “first president United States” and “George Washington” are all together, but it doesn’t know.
So if you could convince 10 million people to go onto Reddit and Facebook and Wikipedia and so on and say that Abraham Lincoln was the first President of the United States, then the next version of ChatGPT, once it has read more current stuff online, will sometimes tell a student that Abraham Lincoln is the first President of the United States. Because again, there’s no corpus of knowledge. It is predictive. But once students know that, it can really help them understand what it can and cannot do.
