ChatGPT can answer questions about your KTH lectures
Hello Ludwig Kristoffersson, who has developed a tool to summarise KTH lectures content using ChatGPT.
On March 2, Ludwig Kristoffersson, a master’s student in Computer Science, publish a post in the KTH-oriented Facebook group Legends of Tâmorrow. In the Facebook post, he presents a tool he has built to get a better overview of the content of filmed KTH lectures. With the help of ChatGPT, he can ask questions about various lectures and get summaries of their content, keywords and references to course literature. ChatGPT can even try to make jokes about the lectures.
The reviews from students and KTH employees have since been positive, and now Ludwig Kristoffersson spends a large part of his free time keeping the tool up to date.
How did you come up with the idea for this tool?
"Many courses have recorded lectures; even if a lecture is interesting, you may zone out and miss some. I follow many AI accounts on Twitter and saw an exciting solution for transcribing Teams meetings. Then I thought it should be possible to let a program transcribe the videos and let ChatGPT analyse the content."
"About a month ago, I had a weekend without any plans. Then I thought it would be fun to build this, so I did. Some friends who know more about machine learning tested the tool and thought it was nice."
So then you started using it in your studies?
"Yes, and I noticed that it worked well. And then, I thought even more students could have the tool as support. I want to see the tool as complementary support, not as a substitute for watching lectures. Before a lecture, it is nice to know what it will be about, to be able to ask questions during the lecture, and then afterwards to get a summary."
How accurate is the tool in analysing the lectures?
"Initially, the tool had difficulties with lectures with poor sound, but it works better now. And if a lecture uses certain difficult-to-pronounce terms, the transcription may be incorrect. In addition, the answers can differ depending on how you formulate your question. But I’m surprised at how good the tool picks up keywords."
"I’ve never been so hooked on a system like this before, and it’s hard to sit and use it without feeling like it’s the next big thing. It will be exciting to see what the next release, GPT-4, can do. It is said that it should also be able to analyse images and videos and, perhaps, for example, understand equations." [GPT-4 was released after the interview was conducted]
How have the reactions been from KTH?
"There is no collaboration with KTH, but the IT department has told me they are impressed. In the university world, there is a lot of fear that ChatGPT will help students cheat by, for example, writing their work - which would be completely wrong. But this tool proves there are also good things to pick up when it comes to studying."
Can students themselves add lectures that can be analysed?
"Yes, the entire content is based on user contribution. Everything from KTHPlay can be analysed, but I have put in a specific block for Youtube. Analysing, for example, an influencer’s YouTube videos does not make sense. But to get around that, someone figured out that I could ask ChatGPT to analyse if the video is a lecture or something else, so now it’s ChatGPT that approves whether a Youtube video should be analysed or not. It doesn’t work perfectly, but fine."
How much time do you spend on the tool?
"I study full-time and have a job on the side, so I try to stay away during the day, and the same when studying for exams. But in the evenings and weekends, I work with the tool. I haven’t measured the time and probably don’t want to either. I fix it because it’s fun."
Do you have any hope for the future with the tool in the long run?
"It’s going so fast that I haven’t had time to think. It’s only been a month since I got the idea. The first week was spent fixing the tool’s initial errors. The current issue with the tool is that it is not free of cost for me to maintain. Therefore, I have tried to contact, for example, KTH Innovation for support. Until the summer, I aim mainly to solve the problem that it costs me money to run the tool. Otherwise, I have no real plan. We’ll see what happens!"