News Story

ChatGPT and Friends: How Generative AI is Going to Change Everything

Jane Whild, Monday 27 Mar 2023

On March 23, 2023, KMi hosted an open forum called "How Generative AI is Going to Change Everything." The event was about ChatGPT and related technologies such as DALL E 2 and Stable Diffussion. It aimed to explain what lies underneath this type of AI, including its limitations, facilitate discussions and see if there was sufficient interest in holding an ethical workshop. The talks covered a wide range of areas, from technical underpinnings, testing against OU module assignments, ethical, diversity and inclusivity issues and how this technology might be deployed.

The hybrid event, which was supported by the KMi Knowledgemakers, was a huge success, with over 40 attendees at the KMi Podium and 220 online attendees from across the University. There were presentations on the basics of ChatGPT/GPT-3/GPT-4, the difference between the different versions of GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer), and some pointers towards the future. The meeting chat was buzzing with comments, discussion and pointers to examples.

John Domingue, Professor of Computer Science, opened the event describing the technology as a very sophisticated text predictor, with GPT3 being described as "a text predictor on steroids." He introduced the differences between the different versions of GPT, including the amount of text they can process and generate. John shared a slide describing the OU’s AI agents ecosystem which is effectively an AI strategy for the OU.

John said afterwards: “The forum showed the wide range of stimulating work going on in this area across the OU. See the presentation slides on the GenAI website”.

He praised the organising team for smooth planning and running of the event: Lucas Anastasiou (PhD Research Student), Shuang Ao (PhD Research Student), Matteo Cancellieri (Lead Developer – Open Research), John Domingue, David Pride (Research Associate) and Aisling Third (Research Fellow). Thanks also to Ben Hawkridge (AV project Officer).

KMi is continuously looking to improve how we work and manage change with effective technologies using data and evidence. Follow our GenAI website for future events on this area.

Finally, if you missed the event, Chris Douce (Senior Lecturer in School of Computing & Communications) has written a blog post summarising some of the presentations.

Thanks to the presenters from KMi, C&C, E&I, IET, LAL & Student Support Innovations who contributed to the forum’s success. The list of presentations and the WORKSHOP REPLAY can be seen on the GenAI Webpage.

Story Credits: With thanks to Chris Douce and ChatGPT.