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During my last semester of the Business Administration bachelor program at Rotterdam School of Management, I was enrolled in the core course Digital Business. This course, provided by the current Business Information Management MSc director Dimitrios Tsekouras, was developed to provide students with a better understanding of how firms, consumers and employees are impacted by the evolution of digital technologies, and how understanding their impact can be leveraged to their advantage (Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2022).  

Naturally, the best way to understand new digital technologies is to use them yourself. Furthermore, some of the most talked about novel technologies last year were generative AI tools. These two reasons combined are why professor Tsekouras decided to incorporate ChatGPT into the Digital Business course. 

For students, the task at hand seemed simple. One component of the final course grade consisted of writing two essays on course related topics. The catch, however, was that both essays had to be written by using ChatGPT. While most of my fellow students were excited to receive two high grades for free, I was sceptical. Up until that course, I had not used ChatGPT or any other generative AI tool for that matter, nor did I have any idea of how they worked. “You are better off learning how to work with this new technology in a structured manner at university, then having to start using it haphazardly later in your career“, the professor said. Perhaps he is right, I thought, and thus I set to work.  

For both essays, we were tasked with inputting all the requirements into ChatGPT, and having it write the entire essay for the initial draft. I thought to myself that there was no way ChatGPT could write a coherent essay in one go based on all the different requirements I gave it, but for both assignments the initial drafts came out surprisingly well. After the initial draft, we were tasked with properly reading the text ChatGPT generated, and then giving instructions to the AI tool on how the essay should be improved. This would range from rewriting a sentence or two on a very specific subject, to rewriting entire paragraphs when it did not quite understand what was required, to asking it to implement proper sourcing within the text. 

My main takeaways from this experience were that there are definitely benefits to utilizing ChatGPT for school. Such an approach would allow me to think more deeply about the actual content of my university work, and less about writing in proper English and the structure of the text. However, it is really easy to let your guard down and have ChatGPT cook up some real nonsense if you do not properly check its output. Therefore, I would like to recommend my fellow students who do not like using generative AI at all to still give it a shot, as I experienced that there are benefits to using them within school context. 

References

Bachelor Business Administration Curriculum. In: 2022 Course Catalogue Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. Erasmus University Rotterdam, 2022. Accessed from: https://eur.osiris-student.nl/#/onderwijscatalogus/extern/indeling/RSM_BAB

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Contemporary technologies are making great strides in improving human health. Us students have had the pleasure of witnessing what a combination of AR and AI can do for the visually impaired during the third Information Strategy lecture. All of us can be very thankful for technology doing a considerable amount of the heavy lifting in the health sector these days, as it is estimated that by 2030 there will be a shortage of 10 million health workers globally (World Health Organization, 2023).

While its purpose in combatting physical ailments seems straightforward, technology does not quite have as much of an impact in the prevention of mental health issues. Therefore, I wanted to investigate ChatGPT’s potential to help out those with dark thoughts. Obviously ChatGPT is trained to be a very general model, aimed at providing helpful outputs to an extremely broad range of topics. Nonetheless, a peek at its capabilities could still be insightful.

After explaining ‘my situation’ to ChatGPT, the AI came up with some standard tips on how to deal with it. This wasn’t a bad first response per se, but I wanted to see if I could push it a little further by further explaining my situation.

Unfortunately, ChatGPT’s responses never became more focused on my specific problem. Instead of aiming to have a better understanding of why I was feeling a certain way, perhaps something a human therapist would do, ChatGPT mostly kept returning lists of very general advice.

In conclusion, it does not look like ChatGPT can do a whole lot more for one’s mental health than the average Google search. Perhaps an application which combines generative AI, to ‘form conversations’ with people, and predictive modelling, utilizing strictly mental health data, could form responses which would be helpful at a higher level.

References

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Sep 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com /

World Health Organization: WHO. (2023). Health Workforce. www.who.int. https://www.who.int/health-topics/health-workforce#tab=tab_1