A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

I mostly teach graduate students, and in my first lecture, one of the slides goes through several LLMs attempts at a fairly simple prompt to write a seminar introduction for me.

We grade them in terms of factually correct statements, "I suppose" statements (yes, I've worked on influenza, but that's not what I'm best known for), and outright falsehoods.

Thus far none of them have gotten it right - illustrating at least that students need the skills to fact check their output.

I also remind them that they have two major oral exams, and failing them is not embarrassing, it's catastrophic.

Falling an exam is many things but "catastrophic".

Those two exams being their preliminary exam and their dissertation defense.

Failing either is most certainly catastrophic.