How will you you use AI Effectively?

ChatGPT and other AI-based resources are powerful tools: Please take full advantage of opportunities to use AI to deepen your learning during this course. We will talk about how to use it in different ways throughout the course through examples I develop in class and through open discussion of your own efforts. We will also talk about how not to use it.

Used with deliberate intention it can be a powerful tool. For example, relevant to something you will read in week 2, the querries:

"please summarize what is a flux gate magnetometer and how does it work?"

"what is a bootstrap test? Please show the mathematical definition and give examples"

"what is paleomagnetic field inclination, how is it measured and what are the main challenges with obtaining accurate measurements?"

"in what range of seawater temperatures can coral reefs grow?"

Can quickly help you past roadblocks arising from jargon (new vocabulary) and from unfamiliar technical concepts or geological inferences.

Used sloppily, it will provide at best false confidence and, more likely, confusion-- particularly when your AI-modified effort yields a low mark.

You will do a lot of short writing assignments in the first half of the course.

The query "can you make my two sentences related to the results in paper X sound more professional?" will map your words onto whatever you have trained "professional" to mean without adjusting the words for precision or relevance to the specific results in paper X. The more specific and precise are your querries, the more AI becomes a tool.

Some rules of the road, expectations and consequences:

1) You will have writing assigmments that explicitly ask for an AI-modified version of your initial effort. In these assignments, you will have 3 parts. a) your initial effort, b) the suggestion from AI AND c) your implementation of all or part of the suggestion on the basis of a decision you will articulate. The goal is to see HOW you use AI and apply what it gives back so that you are actively engaged with your process of learning. Your process will evolve over the course

=> If you blindly assume the AI-generated answer is the right one and elect not to justify full implementation, you will receive 0 marks for the whole assignment. (read that twice)

2) In addition to writing, you will have mind-mapping and, in the second half of the course, data analysis assignments. Wherever you use AI in these assignments, document carefully how and also where it is used. I may ask you in class to talk about what you did and ask what worked and what did not work for you. Please expect to talk through how you learned. More on that as we move through the course.

=> If you do not document your use of AI on any component of an assignment (it is usually obvious to us), you will receive 0 marks on the whole assignment. (read that twice)

The message here is that there is no penalty for using AI but the penalty is severe if you are not explicit how you used it.

3) These rules and expectations will evolve over the course of the term.