There are many tasks that text generators can offer help with throughout your studies and personal lives. Each platform will address questions and prompts in different ways but ultimately most platforms will be able to help with the following:
Research Assistance:
Study Strategies:
Subject-specific Support:
Language and Grammar Help:
Exam Preparation:
Career Guidance:
General Knowledge Enhancement:
For more information on what types of tasks AI can help you with, see our 'When to Use AI' section
AI text generators such as ChatGPT are trained on a large amount of data scraped from the internet, and work by predicting the next word in a sequence.
All AI text generators can and often do produce plausible but false information, and by their nature will produce output that is culturally and politically biased.
Bing Chat and Google Bard work in a similar way to ChatGPT, but can access information from the internet, and are aimed more at being search tools.
They can
They are also getting increasingly accurate and sophisticated with each release.
What it does:
ChatGPT responses are typically impressive in quality, relevance, accuracy and ability to mimic human-written text.
However ChatGPT still produce false information or unreliable responses.
As an AI system without actual understanding of content, it is also unable to reason or apply critical thinking fully independently.
How it works:
ChatGPT is an LLM based on a machine learning approach called ‘Transformers’, first proposed in 2017, and is pre-trained on large chunks of the internet, which gives it the ability to generate text in response to user prompts, hence the name ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer’
In its standard mode, without plugins, ChatGPT works by predicting the next word given a sequence of words. This is important to understand, as it is not in any sense understanding your question and then searching for a result and has no concept of whether the text it is producing is correct.
As of 2023, free version of ChatGPT cannot access the internet so can’t answer questions beyond its training data cut-off date. ChatGPT 3.5 = September 2021, ChatGPT 4 = January 2022.
Claude is an artificial intelligence system created by Anthropic that is designed to be "helpful, harmless, and honest".
What it does:
It utilises a technique called Constitutional AI to ensure its responses are safe and beneficial.
Claude functions as an intelligent text generator - by analysing the words and context provided to it, Claude can produce human-like written responses on a wide range of topics.
Claude is also given a limited scope of knowledge and abilities that focus on being an assistant.
As an AI system without subjective experiences, Claude relies on its training data to produce text that would be useful for its end users.
Claude can generate everything from conversational replies to long-form content as dictated by the user's text prompts.
Its capabilities make Claude well-suited for assisting with research and writing tasks.
How it works:
The core technology behind Claude is a neural network trained on massive datasets of human conversations. This allows Claude to understand natural language, reason about topics, and generate responses.
Specifically, Claude uses a transformer-based architecture which has shown great promise for open-ended dialog. The neural network continues to learn from new conversations to expand its knowledge.
When a user asks Claude a question or prompts it to write about a certain topic, Claude processes the input text to extract key relevant information. It then accesses its broad knowledge base to formulate an appropriate response.
Claude takes context into account so its responses are on-topic and informed.
What it does:
How it works:
Bing Chat utilises a technique called supervised learning to continually improve its performance. It is trained on billions of online documents and conversations to learn how to have helpful dialogues.
The key advantage of Bing Chat over previous chatbots is its ability to have more contextual and nuanced conversations that better meet user needs.
However, students should still fact check any information given and use proper citations. Overall, Bing Chat demonstrates the capabilities of modern AI as an impactful new tool for learning and research.