Using Chat GPT to Write Course Descriptions

[JumpyTheFrog]

DS1 graduated in May, but I haven't finished writing course descriptions yet. Out of curiosity, I just had Chat GPT write some descriptions for a few courses. I think I'll use its descriptions as a starting place and modify them to more accurately reflect content covered. DS is going to community college, so while I don't need course descriptions, I want to get them done just in case. (Also, I can probably reuse them for DS2.)

Has anyone else tried this?

[Porridge]

Yes I played with chat GPT course descriptions. Mine are younger, so I haven’t needed course descriptions for college applications yet. I found the AI generated ones to be overly wordy, but a helpful starting point when I didn’t know how to get started.

 

i posted about this about a year ago. I’ll try to find it, as there were some replies

[regentrude]

Our homemade courses were so non-standard that it would have taken more time to give the bot a specific enough prompt with all the materials we used  than it took me to just write the descriptions myself. I don't see how that would have saved me anything.

[royspeed]

For most people, the problem with beginning with a Chat GPT draft is that, once it's in front of us, we get sucked into wordsmithing that particular draft; all the key points and ideas have been determined by the AI, and now our vision is obscured.

Put another way, our vision tends to be limited to the draft; it becomes difficult to tear our attention away from the draft / what needs fixing, and, in this case, look afresh at the specifics of the course, the works studied, the principal teaching methods, etc., and, in doing so, form our own observations.

[cintinative]

I created a from scratch lit course and was having writer's block on how to write a short course description. So I fed an AI (it might have been Google Bard) the themes of our study and the names of the works to see how it would address them. It wasn't terrible. Over time, I edited it pretty heavily. Every sentence has been messed with. 😃 

I totally see what the prior posters mentioned being a problem.  I only used it for one course though.  

Just for fun, we fed it my son's honors college essay prompt. The responses were so bad they were comical. It was like a used car salesman wrote it. So over the top.  We got a good laugh out of it.