Dr Tetiana Klymchuk, data scientist specialised in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and UIC Barcelona Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences lecturer; and Dr Alireza Nazarian, senior lecturer of Management at the University of Westminster, gave a session on the usefulness of generative languages such as ChatGPT in the research area.

First, Klymchuk reviewed the evolution of ChatGPT from its beginning, and equated its growth with that of WhatsApp in the day. “As users, we must consider the factors that impact our language when we communicate with ChatGPT: ambiguity, common knowledge, creativity and diversity. One change in a single word can change the way AI processes language.” Klymchuk emphasised the way we communicate with ChatGPT: “for generative models, understanding our constructions perfectly is hard sometimes. Each language, from each country, has its own specific style.”

Next, Tetiana Klymchuk identified the optimal functions of ChatGPT. Among these, she highlighted the functions of summarising text, examining the flow of ideas, recommending information sources, providing suggestions on cause-effect relationships or suggesting how to outline the development of a project, among many other functionalities.

Then, she warned about limitation of ChatGPT functionalities. Generate new ideas from scratch, know what is right or wrong in a specific way or provide reports without supervision, among other uses. Klymchuk ended her session by stating that human intelligence is irreplaceable and ended with the following sentence for though: “Artificial intelligence will not replace you; a person who uses artificial intelligence will.”

Given the rapid growth and rising popularity of using this kind of tools, Dr Alireza Nazarian stressed the need to legally regulate ChatGPT in the research field. “As ChatGPT grows by leaps and bounds, likewise, other AI-powered tools that identify those who use AI illegally and generate monitoring elements,” said Nazarian.

Finally, both experts provided different Ai-powered tools that can help researchers in their work. For example, SciSpace is a papers search engine for finding relevant documents without specifying keywords.

This event was organised and led by UIC Barcelona and is part of the rest of the conferences and sessions on artificial intelligence and generative models that have been held during the current academic year and addressed to students, teachers, researchers and administrative staff.