ChatGPT

How ChatGPT Affects the Information Systems Field

ilseu — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 06:12:25 +0000

How ChatGPT Affects the Information Systems Field ilseu Sun, 04/23/2023 - 23:12 More News Laurie McLaughlin April 24, 2023

Rich Yueh, asst. professor of teaching in information systems

“We’re going to learn how to use ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence tool that can help you better understand the class material, overcome challenges, like language and learning barriers, and yes, even give you the answers to assignments.”

Students in Rich Yueh’s winter and spring 2023 courses were not surprised to hear this in the first few weeks of class. “I’m certainly biased as an information systems professor, but I feel that if I don’t let students explore and learn how to use state-of-the-art technologies in class, I would be doing them a disservice,” says Yueh. “It’s also a fun challenge for me to redesign my courses each quarter to allow students to work harmoniously with new technologies.”

Since the release of ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, Yueh has created new assignments that require students to use ChatGPT and added class modules on how to use ChatGPT effectively and how to navigate ethics and bias issues in artificial intelligence.

Well known for his dedication to helping students stay current with technology, Yueh, assistant professor of teaching in information systems, was honored with the 2021-2022 James Merino Innovation Award, which was created and endowed by alumnus James Merino ’98 to recognize faculty bringing new ideas, methods, tools, and technology to the classroom. He is also a three-time Golden Apple winner—an award voted by students choosing the professors who best teach their subjects.

We turned to Yueh for his insight about ChatGPT and its influence on the future of information systems:

How does the emergence of ChatGPT impact work in the field of information systems?

ChatGPT upended the information systems field after its release. Google and other competitors have scrambled to release their own AI models. Leaders quickly looked for ways to incorporate ChatGPT into their organizations, and entire industries, such as education, were forced to rethink policies and procedures, including academic integrity and meaningful student assessment. We’re realizing the potential benefits—and associated downsides—of letting AI handle certain tasks.

What do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of ChatGPT for the field of information systems?

ChatGPT excels at understanding natural (human) languages and retrieving information. This means that it can understand prompts and questions in context. ChatGPT can generate entire presentation slide decks, troubleshoot complex code, act as a debate partner, and even respond to prompts from the perspective of a famous historical figure. The overall advantage is not what ChatGPT can do, but what people can do with ChatGPT.

Some disadvantages of ChatGPT are that it has a knowledge cutoff and might give incomplete answers about recent events. It is prone to inherit biases from the training data, leading to unintended consequences and ethical concerns. There are also concerns about it being a proprietary product from a for-profit corporation, and how this might affect future pricing and access.

Are any existing positions in the field of information systems at risk of being replaced by ChatGPT and future related technologies, and what kinds of positions might be created?

Low-level positions like data entry and basic programming and content generation are at risk of being replaced by ChatGPT and automation in general. On the other hand, many new types of positions will be created, and I’m following three in particular:

Human-AI collaboration experts, who can facilitate effective and growing collaboration between humans and machines
AI integration specialists, who know how to integrate AI into existing systems and corporations and bridge the gap between traditional and AI systems
AI ethicists and bias auditors, who ensure the responsible and fair use of AI and other technologies.

What is your outlook on the impact of artificial intelligence in the field of information systems in the future?

I have a positive outlook on artificial intelligence. I teach my students to think of it not as artificial intelligence, but as augmented intelligence. In the days just before ChatGPT’s release, we were using machines to augment what we could do as humans alone. After ChatGPT’s release, it’s still the same thing—we’re using and working with technologies to do what we couldn’t before.

A Modernist painting of students using laptops in the classroom, generated by DALL·E

_____________

Read an article by Prof. Margaret Campbell about possible impacts on the field of marketing:

Chatgpt and marketing

What Is the Impact of ChatGPT on Marketing?

ilseu — Mon, 24 Apr 2023 05:58:30 +0000

What Is the Impact of ChatGPT on Marketing? ilseu Sun, 04/23/2023 - 22:58 More News Laurie McLaughlin April 21, 2023

Margaret Campbell, Chair and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs, Professor of Marketing

With the eruption—and disruption—of ChatGPT in many business sectors, UCR’s Anderson Presidential Chair in Business Administration Margaret Campbell shares important insight into the early potential impacts, advantages, and disadvantages of this pervasive technology on the marketing field.

Campbell serves as associate dean, department chair, and a professor of marketing at the UCR School of Business. Her research is widely published and focuses on consumers as intuitive psychologists who use their knowledge to make inferences about the marketplace. She is well known for her research on consumers’ understanding of persuasion and on price fairness. Most recently, her work examines marketplace-relevant knowledge in children, studying topics including children’s responses to the use of cartoon characters on product packaging and other aspects related to health.

Campbell answers questions about ChatGPT and the marketing industry:

How does the emergence of ChatGPT impact work in the field of marketing?

I predict that this first stage will emerge with ChatGPT being used as an aid in developing ideas that humans will then further refine and develop.

The field of marketing covers a lot of ground, including jobs in brand management and strategy, pricing, product development, channels of distribution, advertising, social media, and more. ChatGPT and other advanced language models will impact each of these different types of marketing in different ways, but the one thing we can be sure of is that these AI models will impact them.

ChatGPT will be, and already is, used to answer consumer questions, develop content, provide ideas for products, generate slogans, analyze data, and more. At this point, people are trying things—basically throwing things at the ChatGPT wall, so to speak—to see what happens.

I think that the primary advantage is efficiency. ChatGPT can efficiently take in large amounts of information and use it, whether it is for language/content development or data analysis. The speed it offers is already fairly amazing.

What do you think are the disadvantages of ChatGPT for the field of marketing?

One big disadvantage I see right now is that, as I understand it, ChatGPT and similar technologies do not have any way of judging whether what it provides is correct. So, it can efficiently “answer” queries, but the answers may or may not be correct. So, for example, it would be difficult to turn over to customer service without some kind of oversight.

Another disadvantage is that ChatGPT is based on what is already there and what it is trained on. At this point, it will have a hard time being truly creative rather than derivative. Creative is novel and useful; ChatGPT is less likely to be able to achieve this.

One more important disadvantage is that we do not yet know what pricing will be applied to these new tools. Right now, they are free because we are all being used as beta testers, but, of course, there will need to be some way to pay. That will certainly impact the “efficiency.”

There are also a variety of ethical concerns. Key among those for marketing are ownership, privacy, and biases. For example, who owns what is created by ChatGPT? If a brand slogan is output from ChatGPT, does the brand own it? What about patents?

Are any existing positions in the field of marketing at risk of being replaced, and what kinds of positions might be created as a result of ChatGPT and future related technologies?

Given what we are currently seeing, I think that the positions in marketing at most risk of impact, including replacement, by ChatGPT and related technologies are those that are language based, visually based, or data analytic.

For example, I think that copywriting, whether for print, commercials, or social media, is at real risk from ChatGPT. It is not that I think that all human copywriting will be replaced, but that the number of copywriters needed will decrease as ChatGPT and related technologies are used to assist in the creation of content. A human copywriter can prompt various ways to get fairly well-written copy and then tweak/edit it to be even better for the topic at hand and desired voice. Similarly, I think that some jobs in public relations will be impacted. The same risk exists for artists and designers from tools, such as Midjourney, which can provide visuals quickly and efficiently.

It is much harder to predict what positions will be created. However, to this point, with each technological advance, humans have figured out other things to do when technology eliminates the need for some jobs. My hope is that the efficiencies created by AI technologies will enable all humans to use their ingenuity in other ways.

_______________________

Read an article by Prof. Rich Yueh about possible impacts on the field of information systems:

ChatGPT and Information Systems