Assignment 4: ChatGPT

Please use ChatGPT, Google and whatever other tools might be useful to do this assignment. The point is not so much to solve the problems, but to learn how to use these tools effectively, and to discover their strengths and weaknesses.

Question 1

Suppose you were a high school student and you were asked to write an essay on witch hunts. Please use whatever tools you can find to write an essay that covers the following questions:

  1. What does Trump mean when he refers to witch hunts?
  2. What did witch hunt mean in Salem Massachusetts in the late 1600s?
  3. What did it mean in Europe starting a few hundred years earlier?
  4. What did it mean in Arthur Miller's The Crucible?
  5. What does Red Scare mean, and what is the connection between Arthur Miller and Red Scare?
In addition to the essay, please explain how you did what you did.
  1. Were you already familiar with this material, or did you have to use some tools to answer these questions?
  2. Did you use ChatGPT?
  3. If so, what prompts did you use?
  4. Did you use the output from ChatGPT as is, or did you modify it?
  5. Was it useful?
  6. What did it do well, and are there any opportunities for improvement?
  7. If you used Google, what queries did you use?
  8. If you used any other tools, which tools did you use, and how?
  9. A well written essay should have a high level structure that flows naturally from the beginning to the end, with smooth transitions from one topic to the next. Do the tools mentioned above help with the high level structure and the flow, or did you have to fix that by hand?

Question 2

Sports metaphors often do not translate well from one English speaking country to another. Use the tools mentioned above to explain what the following terms mean. Which sports are these terms from? What do they mean in that sport? How are they used metaphorically outside of that sport? If the term is more common in one English speaking country than other, can you name a country that is likely to use the term?
  1. cover all the bases
  2. drop the ball
  3. dunk
  4. fumble
  5. get on base
  6. hit a home run
  7. out in left field
  8. punt (as a noun)
  9. punt (as a verb)
  10. ragging the puck
  11. run out the clock
  12. sticky wicket
  13. strike out
As with question 1, in addition to answering these questions, I am more interested in which tools you found useful, and how you used them. Did you already know what these terms mean, or did you have to use some tools to answer these questions?

Question 3

Some people are finding ChatGPT to be useful for documentation (e.g., as a replacement for Stack Overflow). Suppose I have a set of vectors from MUSE and I want to index them with annoy and/or faiss.
  1. Find some documentation for how to do this.
  2. If possible, find some examples.
  3. Write a program that creates the index.
  4. Write a program that queries the index.
  5. Provide a short description of what approximate nearest neighbors does, and what is it useful for.
  6. Do a literature survey to find some primary papers on approximate nearest neighbors, as well as some survey papers on the topic
As with the previous two questions, in addition to answering the specific questions, I am more interested in which tools you found useful, and how you used them. Did you already know the answers? Did you use any tools, and were they useful? Which tools were useful, and which were not? What worked and what did not? Do you have any useful comments about what is good for what, and what is not good for what?

Question 4

  1. What is a Tojan Horse? Achilles heel?
  2. Summarize the myth. How much of this myth is mythology, and what may have actually happened?
  3. If I want to go to Troy today, can you give me directions to get there? How long does it take to get there?
As with the previous questions, in addition to answering the specific questions, I am more interested in tools than answers.

Question 5

  1. What were the Opium Wars?
  2. Where did the name come from?
  3. Summarize the conflict from multiple perspectives, including:
    1. England
    2. China
    3. India
    4. United States
    5. France
  4. In the English parliament, which party was in power at the time? Did the party in power agree with the opposition at the time? If not, what were the two positions? Listen to this. Can you use ChatGPT and/or Google to find evidence to support Platt's description of the opposition to the Opium War in England? You may want to listen to much more of this YouTube video because it has answers to many of these questions. The bigger question is what will be the future of academic historians? Will technology make it easier for historians to do research? Or will technology replace historians?

Question 6

Do a search for ChatGPT Google Killer on YouTube, Google and ChatGPT. Can you summarize the various positions that you found? Is ChatGPT going to replace Google? Are there some cases where one is better than the other, and vice versa?