Talk delivered by Tim Graves, write up by Sally Hendergate

Tim delivered an engaging and informative workshop on using chat bots and Large Language Models (LLMs) – and how we can integrate these into our work to make our lives easier. Tim showed us how to use ChatGPT 4o, Google Gemini and Claude, and what pitfalls to be aware of whilst using them (e.g. Hallucination, Bias, and complying with GDPR).

The first part of the workshop focused on working with text, with Tim showing attendees how to use chatbots to help with various documents and how to best use prompts to get the most useful results. Some examples demonstrated were:

• Meeting notes in need of improvement, organisation and summarisation
• Transcribing handwritten notes from an image
• Re-writing unprofessional letters in a more formal tone
• Summarising or explaining technical or academic papers

In the second part of the workshop Tim demonstrated the usefulness of ChatGPT 4o in processing and analysing data, including:

• Uploading a data file to GPT
• Conversing with Chat GPT to ask questions about the data
• Asking GPT to suggest and generate visualisations (e.g. bar graphs, heat maps).
• Predicting future trends based on past data

The workshop concluded with a lively discussion on the ethics and usages of such technologies, including concerns around worker obsolescence, privacy, data sources and the motivations of the companies behind the tech.

In the spirit of Tim’s workshop, I attempted to get Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude and CoPilot to generate some summaries based on the notes I fed in. I experienced quite a few of the pitfalls with chatbots outlined by Tim in my results – including hallucinations – so I decided against using them in my summary, but ChatGPT did compose the following limerick:

At Sussex, a workshop’s in play
With AI to brighten your day
Graves teaches with flair
On prompts, data care
And pitfalls that might lead you astray

More information on the workshop and Tim’s suggested resources and further reading can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/tims-workshop