Public artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT are being embraced by faculty across New Jersey Institute of Technology as the latest classroom tool, just like the introductions of videoconferencing, laptops, computer-aided drafting and pocket calculators that came before. AI itself is an established technology that emerged from research labs in the 1950s — here’s a Newark College of Engineering chemical engineering dissertation using AI techniques in 1974. AI also makes periodic dalliances into consumer life, such as computer chess games in the 1980s and IBM’s Jeopardy-dominating Watson in the 2010s.
But not until the present has AI, and specifically large language models, been so accessible with nothing but an ordinary web browser and no special skills required. Asked to compare itself to previous systems, “ChatGPT differs from established AI tools in its ability to generate human-like responses to natural language inputs with a high degree of coherence and relevance,” ChatGPT stated. To read the full story.