Top AI Tool for 2024 + More!

Hey Friends 👋

Welcome to the latest edition of ‘T3’ – AI Tools & Tech in Higher Education.

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This Edition

• Latest Blog Posts – Catch up on my latest blog posts

• How I Use ChatGPT in My Day-to-Day Academic Role – practical applications of ChatGPT for academics

• ChatGPT Alternatives Academic Literature Reviews – my top picks!

• Share Your Thoughts – What would you like me to write about in future newsletters?

• AI Writing Retreat - Join us in Bali, Indonesia!!

Latest from the blog

Catch up on recent posts from BronEager.com, including:

• 🔗 Supercharging Peer Review: Can AI Replace Human Expertise in Evaluating Academic Journal Articles?

• 🔗 Should I use AI to write my PhD thesis? Reflections on the Responsible Use of Artificial Intelligence for Higher Degree by Research Candidates

In this edition, I tackle a question I get asked at every AI training session I deliver:

“If you were going to pay for one AI tool, which one would you choose?”

My answer: ChatGPT by OpenAI. The paid version is around USD 20 per month. Free version available.

ChatGPT excels in conversational interactions and is easy to interact with because you ‘chat’ with it as if talking to a friend or colleague. It offers informative, context-aware, and coherent dialogue, making it a versatile tool for various research, teaching, and content-creation applications.

How I Use ChatGPT in my day-to-day academic role

Since its introduction in November 2022, ChatGPT has become a cornerstone of my daily workflow, proving indispensable in my AI toolkit.

Below are some practical ways ChatGPT can be integrated into academic routines:

• Literature Review Assistance: After finding credible literature to include in your literature review (see below for some suggested tools to help you locate literature, noting that ChatGPT should not be used for literature search at this time!),

  • ChatGPT’s multimodal functionality allows for the analysis and summarisation of individual research papers, or multiple papers (with some constraints around how many papers you can upload at any one time).

  • After you provide ChatGPT with the papers you want it to analyse, it processes the text therein and can quickly provide overviews of existing research, highlighting key findings and be used to brainstorm ideas for how you might come up with an interesting perspective based on what’s already been written and what hasn’t i.e., it can help you find gaps in the literature and brainstorm topic ideas.

• Drafting Abstracts and Summaries: Academic writers can use ChatGPT to draft abstracts or summaries of their articles, offering concise yet comprehensive overviews of their research findings.

  • If you’ve finished writing your article, it’s approaching midnight and you need to wrap up that pesky abstract before heading to bed, ChatGPT can generate an abstract based on your specified parameters (e.g., headings, or a sample structure). Just supply it with the body text of your paper and instruct it to write an abstract. Tip: change your settings to ensure your paper doesn’t end up being used in ChatGPTs training data!

• Methodology Consultation: ChatGPT can offer suggestions on research methodologies and designs based on the topic and research questions, helping you to ideate and refine novel approaches to investigating your favourite topics.

• Language Polishing and Editing: THIS IS PERHAPS THE #1 REASON I LOVE CHATGPT.

  • It has the ability to rephrase language, turning the scrappiest of words into eloquent prose, although using it for this purpose should be complemented with human intervention before submitting final versions for publication. Also, check editorial guidelines on AI usage before doing so.

• Practising Interview Questions: Before going into the field with your research interview questions, wouldn’t it be nice to test out your questions? With ChatGPT, you can ask it to “Act in the role of [insert description of your interview participant]”, then test out your questions.

  • You might ask ChatGPT to help you rephrase the question wording to enhance clarity or ideate questions the described participant might wish to discuss that you haven’t planned on asking.

  • To learn more about using chatbots to practice your interview questions, please check out my ‘Mastering Research Interviews’ free resource

• Ethical Review and Compliance Checks: ChatGPT can help in identifying potential ethical considerations and compliance requirements relevant to a research project. Note. all final decisions should be made in consultation with relevant human experts.

• Crafting Responses to Grant Applications: Leveraging ChatGPT’s multimodal capabilities, it’s possible to upload a copy of a grant application’s guidelines, then get to work having a ‘chat’ with ChatGPT to ask how you might write responses to the questions in the grant applications so that your response aligns to the grant criteria and strategic objectives.

Want a detailed exploration of any of the above use cases? Let me know and I'll create a future blog post for BronEager.com

ChatGPT Alternatives for Finding Academic Literature

As mentioned above, ChatGPT remains pretty average (ok, it’s downright terrible) at locating ‘real’ academic references. If you do (but please don’t!) ask it to suggest references, it will likely make up authors, paper titles, and even provide you with a fictional doi. These ‘stretches of the truth’ are known as ‘hallucinations’.

Try these AI alternatives to locate academic papers:

• Perplexity - Use this tool to find real papers! You can limit its search criteria so that it only consider academic paper databases. Its answers will include hyperlinks to the source, so you’ll know the paper actually exists (which is rather useful when conducting academic research!)

• Elicit - This paper-finding tool uses semantic search, which is a fancy way of saying that it interprets the underlying meaning of your question and returns relevant paper results - i.e., doesn’t just rely on keyword matching.

Other Chatbots (ChatGPT Alternatives) To Explore:

• Bard - Google’s chatbot offering

• Claude – Developed by Anthropic, its functionality includes uploading and chat with .pdf files! Not available in some regions, e.g., Austria

Activity suggestion: use the same prompt but with multiple chatbots and see how the responses to your prompt vary. The results should surprise you!

Share Your Thoughts

What topics would you like me to explore in future newsletters?

Let me know what content you’d like me to write about and/or how T3 could be improved by emailing me at [email protected]

Thanks for your support! I appreciate you reading this newsletter and sharing it with your friends.

Chat soon,

Bron 

BronEager.com

Save the Date: AI Writing Retreat

Join me for a 6-night / 7-day retreat in Ubud, Bali, in February 2024 to revolutionise your research and publication skills with Artificial Intelligence tools.

• Participate in daily group AI writing training sessions.

• Bring along a writing project (e.g. article, thesis, or book project) and see it accelerate towards completion!

• Enjoy a private room, complete with air conditioning, an en-suite bathroom, a king-sized bed, and a balcony for those moments of reflection.