ChatGPT and Physics Education

Following on the theme of ChatGPT, I see that Phil Moriarty has done a blog post about its use in Physics Education which many of my readers will find well worth reading in full. His findings are well in accord with mine, although I haven’t had as much time to play with it as he has. In particular, it is easily defeated by figures and pictures so if you want to make your assessment ChatGPT-proof all you need to do is unlike lots of graphics. More generally, ChatGPT is trained to produce waffle so avoid questions that require students to produce waffle. This shouldn’t pose too many problems, except for disciplines in which waffle is all there is.

Phil Moriarty also done a video in the Sixty Symbols series, on that YouTube thing that young people look at, which you can view here:

I start teaching Computational Physics next week and will be seeing how ChatGPT does at the Python coding exercises I was planning to set!