There was a moment during the first AI showcase at UTS last week when law academic Dr Evana Wright admitted that a colleague dubbed output by ChatGPT as ‘mansplaining’. The knowing laughter from the academics – who had come to see how they could leverage AI for their own subjects – reflected ChatGPT’s reputation for “confidently wrong” responses.
AI-ready lawyers
Dr Wright explained her experiences of using ChatGPT as a talking point. She has been asking students in Disruptive Technologies and the Law to respond to AI and address the legal ramifications. She expanded on this at the showcase, pointing out that ChatGPT can now pass US law bar exams.
Prompt engineering is the emerging skill of choosing precise wording to get the output you want from generative AI. Dr Wright touched on the legal ramifications to using student or copyrighted work to talk to AI as “what you are putting in adds to the ChatGPT dataset and could become a problem”.
I’m not teaching my students AI, but I’m teaching them to respond to AI.
Dr Evana Wright
She wondered how to teach AI to law students who “aren’t necessarily technical people”. She asks students to envisage generative AI not as a tool “for doing your assessment” but rather a tool to create a rough outline. “The value is using that tool as a lawyer. How will I use AI in my legal practice?”
A picture says the wrong words
Meanwhile Dr Frederique Sunstrum has been guiding students of the Bachelor of Product Design through prompt engineering for image creation. The generative AI tools Midjourney and Dall-E were introduced in Week 3 as AI concept generators for ideation.
Dr Sunstrum showed us image outputs from Midjourney: brushes dripping in paint, when the AI was told “Don’t use paint”, but incorrectly focused on just the word ‘paint’. Practice with prompts is key. Students became discouraged with mis-shapen images, she explained. She said “practice makes for better prompt engineering” and to save the prompts and “use the bad to get better”.
Midjourney is only for inspiration, AI isn’t going to design it for you. Find the good images and go with those; and use the bad to get better.
Dr Frederique Sunstrum
Read about these and other case studies in our Artificial Intelligence in learning and teaching collection.