Real Ways Professionals Can Use ChatGPT to Improve Job Performance
Let’s dive into some real examples of how professionals across sales, marketing, product management, project management, recruiting, and teaching can take advantage of this new tool and leverage it for even more impact in their careers.
Teachers and ChatGPT
Help with grading and feedback on student work.
Example prompt: “Tell me every grammar rule that’s been violated in this student’s essay: [paste in essay]”
Create personalized learning materials.
Example prompt: “Help me explain photosynthesis to a 10th grade student in a way similar to sports.”
Generate lesson plans and activities.
Example prompt: “Create an activity for 50 students that revolves around how to learn the different colors of the rainbow.” or “Generate a lesson plan for a high school English class on the theme of identity and self-discovery, suitable for a 45-minute class period.”
Write fake essays several reading levels below your class, then print them out, and have your students review and edit the AI’s work to make it better.
Example prompt: “Generate a 5th grade level short essay about Maya Angelou and her work.”
Providing one-on-one support to students. Example prompt: “How can I best empower an introverted student in my classroom during reading time?”
From DSC: I haven’t tried these prompts. Rather I post this because I’m excited about the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help people teach and to help people to learn.
One year in, the Utah Supreme Court had approved 30 companies, including those that created initiatives to provide individuals help completing court forms and receiving legal advice via chatbot.
… The ruling is monumental because it allows legal professionals to provide guidance on completing legal forms that might be applied to other areas of law, including through online tools that can reach exponentially more individuals.
“By ruling in favor of Upsolve, the Southern District of New York… established a new First Amendment right in America: the right for low-income families to receive free, vetted, and accountable legal advice from professionals who aren’t lawyers,” said Rohan Pavuluri, Upsolve’s Co-Founder and CEO.
The University of Chicago Medicine is working with Legal Aid Chicago to embed lawyers at the system’s trauma center in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood to help victims of violence.
The real question AI poses for the legal profession, says Susskind, is to what extent machines can be used to reduce uncertainty posed by problems. The fundamental question, says Susskind, is thus what problems lawyers are currently trying to solve that machines can solve better and quicker. The lawyer’s job in the future will be to focus on what clients really want: outcomes. Machines can’t provide outcomes, only reduce the uncertainty surrounding the potential outcomes, according to Susskind.
Ultimately we need both solutions: fixing copyright law to accommodate works used to train AI systems, and developing AI systems that respect the rights of the people who made the works on which their models were trained. One can’t happen without the other.
“Complicit bias” tops a list of new legal terms and expressions in 2022 compiled by law professors and academics who are on a committee for Burton’s Legal Thesaurus.
Law360 has a story on the top new terms and their meanings. According to the story, “complicit bias” refers to “an institution or community’s complicity in sustaining discrimination and harassment.”
Law360 listed 10 top legal terms, including these:
Professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.
The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian, and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities.
In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds – before writing limericks explaining the functionality.
Is the college essay dead? Are hordes of students going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments? Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?
And what does it mean for professors if the answer to those questions is “yes”?
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Scholars of teaching, writing, and digital literacy say there’s no doubt that tools like ChatGPT will, in some shape or form, become part of everyday writing, the way calculators and computers have become integral to math and science. It is critical, they say, to begin conversations with students and colleagues about how to shape and harness these AI tools as an aide, rather than a substitute, for learning.
“Academia really has to look at itself in the mirror and decide what it’s going to be,” said Josh Eyler, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, who has criticized the “moral panic” he has seen in response to ChatGPT. “Is it going to be more concerned with compliance and policing behaviors and trying to get out in front of cheating, without any evidence to support whether or not that’s actually going to happen? Or does it want to think about trust in students as its first reaction and building that trust into its response and its pedagogy?”
ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.
it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.
1/Large language models like Galactica and ChatGPT can spout nonsense in a confident, authoritative tone. This overconfidence – which reflects the data they’re trained on – makes them more likely to mislead.
The thing is, a good toy has a huge advantage: People love to play with it, and the more they do, the quicker its designers can make it into something more. People are documenting their experiences with ChatGPT on Twitter, looking like giddy kids experimenting with something they’re not even sure they should be allowed to have. There’s humor, discovery and a game of figuring out the limitations of the system.
And on the legal side of things:
In the legal education context, I’ve been playing around with generating fact patterns and short documents to use in exercises.
A growth mindset can help us view feedback as a good thing, which ultimately makes performance reviews more effective. After all, we want to learn, grow, and improve our skills. People with a fixed mindset view criticism as an attack on their self-worth. Growth mindset, by contrast, leaves room for the possibility that we all have blind spots — and that your manager may have valuable insights on how you can hone your skills. Feedback, in other words, isn’t personal. A manager may critique our performance, but a growth mindset helps keep us from tying our performance to our identity.
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The beauty of growth mindset is that it’s self-reinforcing. As you gain more confidence in your own ability to learn and grow, each feedback conversation becomes easier than the last. You become more capable of discussing high-stakes issues with honesty and transparency because neither side feels threatened.
The future looks very different in some parts of the country than in others, and will also vary among national four-year universities, regional universities like Ship, and community colleges. Grawe projects that, despite the overall demographic decline, demand for national four-year universities on the West Coast will increase by more than 7.5 percent between now and the mid-2030s. But in states like New York, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Louisiana, it will decline by 15 percent or more.
Higher ed’s eight-decade run of unbroken good fortune may be about to end.
Demand for regional four-year universities, per Grawe,will drop by at least 7.5 percent across New England, the mid-Atlantic, and Southern states other than Florida and Texas, with smaller declines in the Great Plains. Community colleges will be hit hard in most places other than Florida, which has a robust two-year system with a large Latino population.
The next generation of higher education leaders will take scarcity as a given and “return on investment” as both sales pitch and state of mind.
Nine out of 10 colleges either exclude or understate the net cost of attendance in their financial-aid offers to students, according to estimates published in a new report by the Government Accountability Office. The watchdog agency recommended that Congress consider legislation that would require institutions to provide “clear and standard information.”
The lack of clarity makes it hard for students to decide where to enroll and how much to borrow.
The report, published on Monday, paints a troubling picture of an industry that makes it difficult for consumers to understand the bottom line by presenting insufficient if not downright misleading information. Federal law does not require colleges to present financial-aid offers in a clear, consistent way to all students.
U.S. higher education faces a stable but deteriorating credit outlook in 2023, Fitch Ratings said Thursday, taking a more pessimistic view of the sector’s future than it had at the same time last year.
Operating performance at colleges and universities will be pressured by enrollment, labor and wage challenges, according to the bond ratings agency. Colleges have been able to raise tuition slightly because of inflation, but additional revenue they generate generally isn’t expected to be enough to offset rising costs.
While not all institutions can (or should be) saved, most institutional closures reflect the failure of past governing boards to face the fiscal reality of their institution — and to plan accordingly and in a timely manner. Leaders should always consider and, if necessary, pursue potential partnerships, mergers, or consolidations before a school has exhausted its financial and political capital. The inability or unwillingness of many leaders to take such action is reflected in the fact that the number of institutional closures in higher education far outweighs the number of successful mergers.
In fact, the risk of closure can be predicted. In a prior analysis several coauthors and I reported on a number of risk factors predictive of closure, noting that most schools at risk for closure are small and financially fragile, with declining enrollment and limited resources to mount significant online programs. While there are many clear signs that a school is at risk for closure, the major challenge to mounting a response seems to be the unwillingness of institutional leaders to understand, face and act on these signs.
Journalism jobs are hard to find. But it’s nice work when you can get it.
That’s the takeaway from a new report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce on the payoff of journalism programs. An analysis of federal education and labor data reveals that journalism and communication bachelor’s degrees offer moderate payoff to their graduates, but only 15% of majors end up working in the field early in their careers. Newsroom employment has declined 26% since 2008, and researchers predict it will fall 3% over the next nine years.
Addendum on 12/10/22:
A Sectorwide Approach to Higher Ed’s Future — from insidehighered.com by Sylvia M. Burwell Institutions must seek ways to differentiate themselves even as they work together to address common challenges facing all of higher education, writes Sylvia M. Burwell.
We have to think differently about the future of higher education. And rather than limit our work to what one type of institution or program can achieve, we should look across the entire higher education sector.
A sectorwide [insert DSC:system-wide] approach is needed because the economics of higher education are not going to hold.
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To evolve our thinking on these questions, we should focus on the value proposition of higher education and market differentiation.
From DSC: I was watching a sermon the other day, and I’m always amazed when the pastor doesn’t need to read their notes (or hardly ever refers to them). And they can still do this in a much longer sermon too. Not me man.
It got me wondering about the idea of having a teleprompter on our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and/or on our Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. Or perhaps such functionality will be provided on our mobile devices as well (i.e., our smartphones, tablets, laptops, other) via cloud-based applications.
One could see one’s presentation, sermon, main points for the meeting, what charges are being brought against the defendant, etc. and the system would know to scroll down as you said the words (via Natural Language Processing (NLP)). If you went off script, the system would stop scrolling and you might need to scroll down manually or just begin where you left off.
For that matter, I suppose a faculty member could turn on and off a feed for an AI-based stream of content on where a topic is in the textbook. Or a CEO or University President could get prompted to refer to a particular section of the Strategic Plan. Hmmm…I don’t know…it might be too much cognitive load/overload…I’d have to try it out.
And/or perhaps this is a feature in our future videoconferencing applications.
But I just wanted to throw these ideas out there in case someone wanted to run with one or more of them.
Along these lines, see:
Tell me you’re not going to want a pair of #AR glasses ?
After playing with in for the past 24 hours, I believe #ChatGPT is going to change the world, including the world of law and legal education. Ignore it at your peril. #AI#innovation#legaltech
More interesting results from #ChatGPT. I entered the same prompt about a bicycle accident twice — once bracketed by clear messaging that I was looking for legal advice, once without that messaging. Check out the differences. pic.twitter.com/BJJiGjAvs6
One of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a prof is to start building my classes to start with 1 week of onboarding followed by just 12 weeks of content. Last 2 weeks are just catchup and reassessment. Course is basically over at Thanksgiving.
The global education market is set to reach at least $10T by 2030 as population growth in developing markets fuels a massive expansion and technology drives unprecedented re-skilling and up-skilling in developed economies. The next decade will see an additional 350 million post secondary graduates and nearly 800 million more K12 graduates than today. Asia and Africa are the driving force behind the expansion. The world needs to add 1.5 million teachers per year on average, approaching 100 million in total in order to keep pace with the unprecedented changes ahead in education around the world.
Seriously, #ChatGPT is going to change everything about how people gain access to legal information and guidance. Look at this. pic.twitter.com/BkxZlMxB9o
Out today! Catch the latest episode of Talk Justice for a look at creative ways to connect people with legal professionals and resources– by bus, kiosks and even a kayak! https://t.co/wApNohRJw3
There’s a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing. Google did it. Firefox did it. AWS did it. iPhone did it. OpenAI is doing it with ChatGPT.
In 2023, businesses will realise that, in order to get out of FAQ Land, they need to synchronise business systems together to deliver personalised transactional experiences for customers.
“We finally have the technologies to do all the things we imagined 10 years ago.”
The ABA Legal Technology Survey Report is the most comprehensive study available of lawyers’ actual technology use, spanning a vast range of topics from security and basic office software to technology budgets, marketing tools, and much more. The survey has been published annually for more than 20 years. The 2022 edition features five volumes, each with detailed charts, tables, and trends.
Each year the American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center surveys ABA members to discover how lawyers are using technology in their practices nationwide. The 2022 ABA Legal Technology Survey Report is published in five volumes: Online Research, Technology Basics & Security, Law Office Technology, Marketing & Communication Technology, Litigation Technology & E-Discovery. The published results represent one of the most comprehensive technology surveys of lawyers available.
For over three decades, the ABA has conducted an annual survey of lawyers to find out what legal technology they use. These results are released every year by the ABA Legal Technology Resource Center. The 2022 report was just released (edited by Taylor Young, and researched by Taylor Young and Joshua Poje). There are five volumes, and you can purchase a copy using this page of the ABA website.
I have been looking at these reports every year since 2010 because they have been the best source of statistics on the use of mobile technology by lawyers. (My reports on the prior ABA surveys are located here: 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010.)
Washington, DC (November 22, 2022) – The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) has announced the winner of the 2023 AALS Scholarly Papers Competition for law school faculty members in the field for five years or fewer.
The competition’s selection committee recognized the following outstanding paper:
Nicole Summers, Associate Professor, Georgetown University Law Center, “Civil Probation.”
In “Civil Probation,” Summers investigates the outcomes of eviction settlements. Based on her empirical findings, she advances a novel theory of “civil probation” within the eviction legal system. The article will be published in an upcoming issue of Stanford Law Review. … “With eviction complaints comprising nearly a quarter of all civil filings, it’s crucial we develop policies that address the myriad ways tenants are systemically disadvantaged in the cases and ultimately harmed. I am very grateful to my mentors and colleagues for encouraging and supporting me in this project.”
Implementing UDL with a Focus on Accessibility UDL is a proven methodology that benefits all students, but when instructors embrace universal design, they need to consider how their decisions will affect students with disabilities.
Some key considerations to keep in mind:
Instructional materials should not require a certain type of sensory perception.
A presentation that includes images should have accurate alternative text (also called alt text) for those images.
Transcripts and captions should be provided for all audio content.
Color alone should not be used to convey information, since some students may not perceive color (or have different cultural understandings of colors).
Student presentations should also follow accessibility guidelines. This increases the student’s workload, but it’s an excellent opportunity to teach the importance of accessibility.
From DSC: I received an email the other day re: aTytoCare Exam Kit.It said (with some emphasis added by me):
With a TytoCare Exam Kit connected to Spectrum Health’s 24/7 Virtual Urgent Care, you and your family can have peace of mind and a quick, accurate diagnosis and treatment plan whenever you need it without having to leave your home.
Your TytoCare Exam Kit will allow your provider to listen to your lungs, look inside your ears or throat, check your temperature, and more during a virtual visit.
Why TytoCare?
Convenience – With a TytoCare Exam Kit and our 24/7/365 On-Demand Virtual Urgent Care there is no drive, no waiting room, no waiting for an appointment.
Peace of Mind – Stop debating about whether symptoms are serious enough to do something about them.
Savings – Without the cost of gas or taking off work, you get the reliable exams and diagnosis you need. With a Virtual Urgent Care visit you’ll never pay more than $50. That’s cheaper than an in-person urgent care visit, but the same level of care.
From DSC:
It made me reflect on what #telehealth has morphed into these days. Then it made me wonder (again), what #telelegal might become in the next few years…? Hmmm. I hope the legal field can learn from the healthcare industry. It could likely bring more access to justice (#A2J), increased productivity (for several of the parties involved), as well as convenience, peace of mind, and cost savings.
The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans — from the Legal Services Corporation
Legal Services Corporation’s 2022 Justice Gap Report provides a comprehensive look at the differences between the civil legal needs of low-income Americans and the resources available to meet those needs. LSC’s study found that low-income Americans do not get the help they need for 92% of their civil legal problems, even though 74% of low-income households face at least one civil legal issue in a single year.
The consequences that result from a lack of appropriate counsel can be life-altering – low-income Americans facing civil legal problems can lose their homes, children and healthcare, among other things. Help can be hard to access, so LSC is working to bridge this “justice gap” by providing pro bono civil legal aid for those in need. Find out more about LSC’s work to ensure equal justice for all by tuning in to the rest of the Justice Gap video series.
