Where is ChatGPT useful? Where is it not useful?

Question

Where is ChatGPT useful?

Where is it not useful?

Answer 1

ChatGPT, like other advanced language models, has a broad spectrum of usefulness but also certain limitations. Here's a detailed analysis:

Where ChatGPT is Useful

Information Retrieval and Summarization: ChatGPT can efficiently process large volumes of text and provide summaries or answer specific queries. This is particularly useful in academic, professional, and casual research contexts.

Education and Learning Assistance: It can assist students with explanations of complex topics, provide examples, and help with language learning. It's also useful for educators in creating teaching materials and quizzes.

Content Creation: ChatGPT is adept at generating creative content like stories, poems, dialogue, or even code snippets. This is beneficial for writers, marketers, and developers.

Programming Assistance: It can help debug code, explain programming concepts, and suggest code improvements, acting as a helpful tool for both novice and experienced programmers.

Language Translation and Language Processing: ChatGPT can perform translations between various languages and understand context and nuances to a certain extent.

Customer Service and Support: It can be used in chatbots to provide first-level customer support, handling FAQs, and guiding users through troubleshooting steps.

Accessibility: For individuals with disabilities, such as those who have difficulty typing, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool for communication and information access.

Where ChatGPT is Not Useful

Handling Personalized or Context-Specific Information: ChatGPT lacks access to real-time data and personal histories, making it unsuitable for tasks requiring up-to-date or user-specific information.

Complex Decision Making: It's not suitable for making complex, high-stakes decisions like medical diagnosis, legal advice, or financial planning, as it lacks real-world judgment and expertise.

Real-Time Interaction and Situational Awareness: It cannot interact in real-time scenarios or understand situational contexts, limiting its effectiveness in dynamic environments.

Emotional Intelligence: While ChatGPT can mimic empathetic responses, it lacks true emotional intelligence and understanding, which can be crucial in counseling or therapeutic contexts.

Original Research and Innovations: ChatGPT cannot conduct original research or create genuinely innovative ideas. It synthesizes from existing knowledge and patterns.

Internet Browsing and Real-Time Data: As of its training cut-off in April 2023, it doesn't have browsing capabilities or access to current data, news, or events.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is a powerful tool with a wide range of applications, particularly in information processing, education, content generation, and basic programming assistance. However, its limitations in handling personalized, context-specific, and real-time information, along with its lack of emotional intelligence and inability to perform high-stakes decision making, make it unsuitable for certain tasks. Users should be mindful of these limitations and use ChatGPT as a complement to human judgment and expertise, rather than a replacement.

Answer 2

It's not hard to get answers from ChatGPT, no matter what the topic is.

But there are two common problems with ChatGPT answers:

1. You do not understand the answer.
2. The answer may be for a slightly different problem than yours.

I will explain.

Problem Number 1:

Students of mine who have used ChatGPT sometimes come to me because they do not understand the answer that ChatGPT gave them. They don't understand the topic, the question, or both well enough to understand ChatGPT's answer.

Sure, you can submit ChatGPT's answer as your own, and you'll probably get credit for the homework.

But the reason homework is given is for you to really learn the material, it's not just a stupid hoop to jump through.

I think everyone, including me, has read the course readings and listened to the lectures, and thought "I understand this." But then you look at the homework problems, and you go "huh?". You realize that your understanding is incomplete and shallow. You may not even understand the question. So you have to go through the course readings and lectures again, and apply that to the problems. That's where the deepest learning happens.

Maybe you're taking this course only because it's required, it's outside of your major or your area of interest, and you think you'll never use it again, so you go "why bother putting in the effort, let's just use ChatGPT".

Before you do that, ask yourself or your teacher why this course is required.

Problem Number 2:

On top of problem number 1, ChatGPT may not be answering the question you asked, it may be answering a slightly different question.

How many times have you had to ask a teacher or tutor for help to understand questions? Sometimes questions are stated in an ambiguous way, with more than one possible interpretation. Or the teacher's first language is not English. Or the teacher wrote the question in a rush.

If you have trouble understanding the question, how do you know ChatGPT will interpret the question properly? ChatGPT doesn't truly understand anything. It just "learns" to connect various phrases and text snippets with each other.

I have had students come to me with a ChatGPT answer. Sometimes the answer is not correct, it's actually answering a slightly different question. Or, commonly, I have my own way of explaining a problem and how to solve it, so I just ignore the ChatGPT answer, and the student understands me just fine.

Recommendation:

I recommend not using ChatGPT. If you decide to use it, I recommend trying to understand ChatGPT's answer, and verify that it is correct.

Answer 3

Hello,

In my personal use of it, I strongly recommend not using it for complex questions you would find in higher level Mathematics. For most Calculus it is fine, but even then I strongly recommend not using it because there were times that it has gotten very trivial things incorrect and most users don't verify the validity of the answer anyway and accept the answer at face value.