A short YouTube monologue (by Kyle Balmer) describing a teaching technique where students run assignments through ChatGPT to generate the "median" or generic essay answer. The speaker argues that seeing this median response helps students identify what to avoid and then edit/improve it, leveraging that humans often edit better than create from scratch; the method is presented as an inspired use of ChatGPT for creative tasks.
Chapters
Unique use of ChatGPT. Really cool idea. So I heard from an English Prof. That encourages his students to run assignments through ChatGPT to learn what the median essay story response to the assignment will be so that they can avoid and transcend. I think this is a really cool use of ChatGPT. So if you don't give any specific prompts or instructions or context, generally ChatGPT is going to give you a relatively generic answer. So if you just take whatever your assignment is and you plug it into ChatGPT, you're going to get a very generic, very median, very boring answer. Obviously, we know with a bit of prompt engineering, with a bit of better communication, we can get a better answer out of it. But what we're doing here in this suggestion is using ChatGPT to find out what that median answer looks like. And that gives us a basis from which to build a better answer. Because as humans, we're much better generally at editing than we are creating from scratch. So once we see the median, once we know what's generic, we can think, oh, okay, I could do it better in this way. And that allows us to use it as a jumping off point in order to make something that's a lot better. So once we know what not to do, it's much easier for us to hit the target of what we should be doing. Personally, I think this is an inspired way to use ChatGPT to get better at creative tasks.