I have witnessed that people in my university, and a lot of people on social media, have adopted ChatGPT into their workflow. These "co-pilots" are a crucial part of working and they live permanently on the side. You are constantly sending it ideas and editing the draft. For that to happen, you need a keyboard which makes the iPad without a keyboard useless for people working in 2023. Of course, people say you can use the iPad with a keyboard but at that point, you might as well use the MacBook instead.
What are your thoughts on iPad's place in a world of AI butlers, like ChatGPT?
Having a good understanding of what an "AI butler" actually is, and how they work behind the scenes, I don't use them for any kind of "real work". They're fun to play with, sure. But trust with my work? No. So I'm still good with my iPad and its limited built-in text input capabilities.
I strongly disagree that these "co-pilots" are a crucial part of working. They're shiny new text prediction engines, much like autocomplete on your iPhone, only trained on a larger dataset. The "I" in "AI" is a big misnomer. There is no intelligence at work.
I have a bit of a unique perspective when it comes to this sort of stuff in academia. I run the online learning management/course delivery systems for 13 or so universities and colleges. I also went to university for my undergrad both in the 90s and again 12 years later in the 2000s [I kinda got distracted the first time around]). That experience + my current work has given me a great deal of insight on how students have adapted to new technologies over the years.
Students have always looked for shortcuts to get their work done, and in the past 25 years or so these shortcuts have become more and more technologically-based. And I get it - depending on your area of study the workload can be huge (my area of study was physics, my 3rd year workload was nuts). Who wouldn't want to be more "efficient"?
But when it comes down to it, ChatGPT, Bard or Bing isn't likely to be there to answer questions or bounce ideas off during your final exam. In the long run, it's better to put in the effort to learn how to write a good essay, or write a C++ program, or calculate that partial differential equation yourself rather than trust that a predictive text bot running a bunch of linear algebra in a Microsoft datacenter is going to successfully and accurately do the work for you.
