WhatsUp Chat

The Chat tool is a real-time, text-based collaboration tool. You can use the Chat tool to brainstorm ideas, hold a question and answer period, have a debate or discussion, or organize a remote study group. As opposed to other collaboration tools, such as Discussions, Chat conversations occur in real-time. You can set up course specific chat rooms or chat rooms that involve individuals from all over the organization. There are two types of chat:

• General (or Course) chats  General chats are public chats visible to everyone enrolled in the org unit where they are created. General chats allow you to incorporate chat discussions into the teaching of a course since they are automatically open to all users enrolled in the course.
• Personal chats  Personal chats are private and visible only to users who you have added to the chat’s participants list. Personal chats are ideal for keeping in touch with friends and colleagues or for clubs and other groups whose members do not share a single org unit.

Chat bots like GPT are powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques to make predictions to string words together in a meaningful way. They not only tap into a vast amount of vocabulary and information, but also understand words in context. This helps them mimic speech patterns while dispatching an encyclopedic knowledge.

Other tech companies like Google and Meta have developed their own large language model tools, which use programs that take in human prompts and devise sophisticated responses. OpenAI, in a revolutionary move, also created a user interface that is letting the general public experiment with it directly.

Some recent efforts to use chat bots for real-world services have proved troubling — with odd results. The mental health company Koko came under fire this month after its founder wrote about how the company used GPT-3 in an experiment to reply to users.

Koko cofounder Rob Morris hastened to clarify on Twitter that users weren't speaking directly to a chat bot, but that AI was used to "help craft" responses.