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AI, ChatGPT, and more generative tools: Home

This guide provides a starting place for MVC faculty, staff, and students to learn about ChatGPT and generative AI and how to use it responsibly.

What is ChatGPT and Generative AI?

Generative AI, or generative artificial intelligence, is a form of machine learning that is able to produce text, video, images, and other types of content. ChatGPT is an example of generative AI applications that produce text or images based on user-given prompts or dialogue.

ChatGPT stands for “Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer”, and it's a generative AI language model that acts in a conversational way.  It is a language model trained on extensive amounts of text data, enabling it to generate human-like responses to user prompts.

ChatGPT and Generative AI

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The Basics of ChatGPT and AI

Artificial intelligence that uses generative techniques can create a variety of content, including text, images, audio, and synthetic data. The ease of use of new user interfaces for quickly producing high-quality text, graphics, and videos has fueled recent interest in generative AI.ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence language model, similar to a chatbot, but more robust.

ChatGPT is not a search engine where you are given a set of results to a specific search, but instead it creates “new content” by predicting the word most likely to come next (e.g. based on HUGE dataset -- publicly available Internet sites as of 2020).

Language Learning Models (LLMs), like ChatGPT, are designed to model human language and use mathematical models to predict what the next word is most likely to be based on what you are asking for.

Keep in mind: they don't think. They don't understand, read, choose or give you the "best information." Sometimes it might feel or seem like it, but this isn't how the technology works. That said, they also won't tell you where they got the information they're pulling from, and who is doing the work behind the scenes. Many, if not most, are unregulated and influenced by how we all interact with it. 

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