WashU Encourages ChatGPT Use- why that's AWESOME

Welcome to The Zenpreneur, the newsletter that makes you smarter about business and health within your first 11 sips of morning coffee.

We’ve got a spicy school edition for ya.

Imagine telling Lewis and Clark not to go Westward when they were exploring the Americas. Or Elon Musk not to put all his money from selling PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX. Or telling David Goggins not to run tomorrow morning….

In an earlier edition, we discussed how NYC schools are banning ChatGPT.

School administration, always taking that extra unnecessary step...

It may seem like a way to prevent cheating in the short term, but this is simply the wrong move. To justify this decision the educational department in one NYC school stated that ChatGPT would have “negative impacts on student learning”.

The way of viewing this new technology seems to gloss over the fact that such tools are only getting started- GPT-4 models are being trained on 1000x more training data than ChatGPT, and banning it would be akin to banning the use of the internet in schools.

So, what's the solution?

WashU seems to have a much better approach. The Office of the Provost put out a letter stating that because AI is evolving rapidly, they recommend that students familiarize themselves with ChatGPT by “entering assignment prompts and evaluating the responses”.

W Provost office. Boss administration.

That’s simply a power move- the office itself provides the doors for students “go around the system” in a sense. This is what students did anyway using google during the pandemic- this just makes the process easier.

How about skill? Well, knowing what prompts to input into the system, and evaluating outputs will be key moving forward. Evaluating quality, QA testing code, and optimizing prompt inputs will all be key moving forward.

In the spirit of student innovation, here are some quick AI tools for schools and students to be aware of:

• Jasper AI- copywriting

• Copy AI - copywriting

• https://www.plag.ai/ → (AI plagiarism checker)

• Originality (https://originality.ai/?ref=producthunt) → Plagiarism checker that launched on product hunt recently

• AI Data Sidekick (https://www.producthunt.com/products/ai-data-sidekick)---> helps write SQL code much faster (CS students, we got you)

• ChatGPT….(shocking!)

Anyways, lads, the way WashU is approaching this new technology is totally correct and should be the model by which every educational institution on the planet should approach this new technology.

Enjoy your day, for with ChatGPT, you shall play.... (too extra?)

Peace.