Ohio University faculty, researchers and academic support staff interested in building custom chatbots are invited to a half-day, hands-on workshop designed by Professor Jared DeForest, CTLA GenAI faculty fellow and chair of the Department of Environmental and Plant Biology.

During the workshop, participants will be introduced to custom GenAI chatbots and how they differ from ChatGPT and other platforms, think about the use cases for this type of chatbot and receive a tutorial on how to frame knowledge to create the chatbot for use in teaching and research. Particular focus will be placed on developing and training a customized GPT model to function as a teaching assistant for a course. Participants will also consider methods for evaluating and improving their chatbots.

At the end of this workshop, any participant with access to ChatGPT-4o will have a functional and tested custom GPT.

 Outcomes: After participating in this workshop, participants will:

• Understand strengths and limitations of custom GPT's and evaluate whether they can be applied to their teaching and/or research environment. 
• Understand the ethical considerations and evaluate whether custom GPT’s will align with their vision of their GPT. 
• Be able to create a custom GPT with Knowledge and understand how to train to GPT with Instructions to serve a specific purpose, but set boundaries to protect academic and research integrity.  
• Be able to evaluate their GPT performance on usefulness and integrity to make necessary changes to the Instructions.

Register here.