Overview

In this activity, we are going to the use the citations you gathered for assignment two to collaborate with chatGPT to draft a research paper on The Confessions of Nat Turner.

In addition to illustrating how chatgpt might be used appropriately for a research project, this assignment will give you valuable practice introducing sources you’ve found and interrogated so you are ready to do this on your own as we move into the research project.

Before Class: Hallucinating Sources

Before class, listen to the episode of Fresh Air included below, in which Terry Gross and New York Times technology reporter Cade Metz discuss the dangers of AI. In class, we will discuss what they say from minute 35:58 to the end.

Step 1: If You Were Writing a Research Paper…

Now that you’ve concluded work on your research notes, you should have a very specific research question, a list of sources you would cite in your paper, and (perhaps) a sense of how you would answer your question (a claim).

Step 2: Prompting ChatGPT

Together, we’ll talk about how you might turn your research question and sources into a prompt for ChatGPT and then you’ll craft a prompt for ChatGPT in Our Doc. In front of the class, I will use my ChatGPT account to ask each of your questions and share the text it spits out in Our Doc.

Step 3: Revising Citations

After I’ve put the response to your prompt in Our Doc, you will each decide how you want to revise what the tool has generated. We will all shift from “editing” to “suggesting” in our doc to track the changes we would make to the text generated by chatGPT. Your first step will be to offer a very clear sentence in the introductory paragraph to explain that the paper was drafted by ChatGPT on a specific date. We are going to play around, but your primary goal is to revise the generated texts so that at least one of your sources is introduced, appropriately paraphrased or quoted, cited properly, and engaged meaningfully to support the claim you think you might make.

Step 4: What Do You Think?

Before our next class, I’ll ask you to compose a reflection on the experience of interacting with ChatGPT and using your understanding of specific source material to revise the text generated by the language model.