In this short post I will briefly return and summarize the talk/seminar I gave to the audience of my colleagues and friends from the Department of Physics and Measurements at UCT Prague about the benefits and posibilites that AI (particularly ChatGPT) can offer to academics slash teachers. The main purpose of this post is just to share the chats that were created during the talk, so everyone can make their own opinion. The aim of the seminar was to somehow share and show different posibilities how to use ChatGPT and revise its usefulness "in-situ", directly during the seminar. Below are examples of a few chats that arised during the talk together with the outputs and sometimes a few comments.
1 Summarize a Paper
In the first example, we focused on using ChatGPT to analyse and summarise a scientific paper. We've chosen an article by our colleagues who were present at the session to see if chat can provide a sufficient summary of your own work. The uploaded PDF of the paper by Scholtz et. al. [1] is accesible directly from the chat environment below.
The output latex codes/files can be accessed Via the Overleaf project or you can download the rendered PDFs below:
Next, we asked Chat to solve the following physical problem (the task is written in Czech) from the attached picture, to see whether and how quickly it is able to eventually help students during the exams.
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This request was immediately followed in the same chat by a request to rewrite/translate another assignment into Latex code so that it would match the appearance in the attached image. And then to convert the whole .docx Word document to Latex. In this case, the result doesn't match the appearance of the attached assignment so well. However, from my own experience I can recommend to create your own Latex (or other HTML etc.) template which chat can easily follow, and just append to it the information provided in the attachment.
The output latex codes/files can be again accessed Via the Overleaf project or you can download the rendered PDFs below:
We then moved on to reading information from an image and using it to generate another. At the moment the problem with Chat and DALL-E is that each generated image is unique, sure there is an option to mark parts of the image and only those will be changed according to the prompts, but if you ask him for another version of your image it will be a "new" and unique one.
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4 Web Application Coding
In this chat I wanted to show one of the strongest sides of ChatGPT - coding. Chat is really strong and can help you a lot with different application programming and software development. So far I have used it a lot to help me with web based programming (especially with .html, .css and .js) and Python or Matlab coding.
Quick update for February 2025: I've also used Chat GPT successfully for programming in NI LabVIEW and for programming measurement devices such as source meters etc. (SCPI, Lua).
I should note that even though Chat provides you with functional examples and can even explain to you what is going on inside the code, it is highly beneficial to understand the programming language. If something doesn't work, troubleshooting and debugging can be a real pain in the ass, and since Chat runs Python in the background during various analyses, it can't execute your code directly. In my case, I've developed my approach to coding with Chat where I usually have a pretty well defined idea of the program structure and I just want him to help me write some subfunctions or adapt parts of already working code.
Below is a simple example of how to ask Chat to create a working version of a web application that simulates simple statistics and can be used to explain concepts to students. To run such output, you can just copy paste it into any text-based programing editor, save it as .html file and open it.
To run such an output, you can simply copy and paste it into any text-based programming editor (Notepad), save it as an index.html file and upload it to your web server or simply open it in your web browser.
The output app can be accessed here.
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Conclusion
ChatGPT or AI in general is a really powerful tool and I strongly believe that it can help you a lot in your daily or academic tasks and simplify your work if used wisely. However,
"ChatGPT can be a good servant but a bad master".
That's why I strongly recommend to check every piece of information and calculation it provides and at least understand the basics of the environment (coding, physics, whatever..) you want it to use for.
I hope to continue adding more Chat examples in the future.
