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Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

Apr 13, 2023 • 14 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X

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ChatGPT's latest version GPT-4 is a great teaching and writing assistant.

If used properly, it can save you a lot of time and labor.

But most folks don't know much about it.

Here's how to use GPT-4 as a teaching/writing assistant:

Open a voice recording app on your phone.

Set the timer for 25 min.

Start talking about your lecture or writing project as soon as the timer goes off.

Don't worry about organization or structure. Keep talking.

Stop when the timer stops.

Do another stint of 25 min if you feel up to it.

Start when the timer goes off. Stop when the timer stops.

Now open a blank document in MS Word and click on the "Dictate" button in the top-right corner.

Then play the recording on your phone.

MS Word will transcribe your voice recording.

Take a break while MS Word transcribes.

Reward yourself. You have done well.

You can also use a transcription app like Otter(dot)ai.
(Please note Otter requires a paid subscription.)

This way you won't have to wait while MS Word transcribes the recording.

I prefer MS Word because there are no timestamps or any other meta-data in the transcript.

You will get a document like this with a large block of text spread across several pages.

Below is a 19,000 words long transcript of a webinar I gave last week on how to become an efficient academic writer with AI apps.

No structure, no organization, no punctuation.

Next open GPT-4 and run the following prompt:

"If I give you a transcription of a talk I gave, can you please remove redundant words and make it coherent and cohesive?"

This prompt is meant to help GPT-4 get ready.

Now copy a few hundred words from the unstructured transcript and run them through GPT-4 with the following prompt:

"Please remove redundant words and phrases from the following passage and make it cohesive and coherent."

GPT-4 will structure and organize the text for you.

Want to learn about more AI-powered apps that will make your academic writing faster and easier?

I have a complete tutorial of 170+ slides for you. More than 1,000 academics are using it.

You can get it here:
efficientacademicwriter.carrd.co

This is a page before running it through GPT-4 with no structure or organization.

This is after having run the same page through GPT-4.

It is nicely structured and organized in paragraphs with proper punctuation and everything. And it's quite close to my personal style.

Run the whole transcript (page by page) through GPT-4 and you will have a great first draft of your lecture/article.

Do a couple rounds of editing to polish it further.

@MushtaqBilalPhD

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More from @MushtaqBilalPhD

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

Dec 11

ChatGPT still generates fake references to papers that don't even exist.

And Google just launched Gemini Deep Research.

It generates well-researched articles with references to published sources.

This will change the way we do literature reviews.

Here's how to use it:

1. Open your Google Gemini.

Click in the top-left corner and select "1.5 Pro with Deep Research."

2. Type in your question in the search bar.

Gemini will understand your question and create a research plan for you.

Then it will give you two options: Edit plan or Start research.

Read 11 tweets

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

Dec 3

Dr. Ally Louks's PhD thesis is set to be one of the most influential theses of 21st century. Puts forward an original argument with remarkable clarity.

Already has 85M+ views on X/Twitter.

Most people criticizing her don't understand her argument at all.

I have a PhD in literary studies, and in this thread, we'll do a close reading of her abstract to understand her argument in simple English.

Before we jump in, we need to keep in mind that a PhD thesis is written for a small group of 3-5 scholars.

These scholars serve as a candidate's supervisor and examiners. They are the only audience of a PhD thesis.

If you think you can't understand a PhD thesis, it's because you are not its intended audience.

Let's start with the title:

"Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose."

There are three important here: ethics, politics, and smell.

Politics here is not used in the sense of running the political affairs of a country. Here, politics means things related to power.

If something reinforces oppressive power strucutres it's considered unethical (e.g. a story that celebrates poor people being discriminated against or getting killed).

If something challenges these power structures, that's considered ethical.

Put simply, the thesis deals with the relationship between smell and power.

In literary studies, we don't look at how things are in the world. That's not our concern. That's the job of anthropologists and sociologists.

Literary scholars look at how things are potrayed in literature. We deal with representations.

This thesis looks at how the relationship between power and smell has been portrayed in modern (1914-1945) and contemporary literature.

Read 16 tweets

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

Nov 29

Sci-Hub — a "pirate" website with 85M research papers freely available.

Here's how to integrate Sci-Hub with Zotero to get paywalled papers for free. This will take you just 5 min.

Billion-dollar academic publishers would get mad at you. So, do it at your own risk🤷

1. Go to this link: github[.]com/syt2/zotero-scipdf

Scroll down and click on "latest release xpi file."

This will download an "xpi" file to your computer.

2. Open your Zotero and click on "Tools" and then "Plugins."

In the Plugin Manager, click on the gear-like icon and select "Install Plugin From File."

Navigate to the "xpi" file you just download and add it.

Close the plugin manager.

Read 5 tweets

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

Nov 28

☹️Google Scholar is a great tool. But it doesn't show you how papers are connected with each other.

😀Here's how to fast-track your literature review with visual search using Google Scholar's database:

(And export papers to Zotero, Mendeley, or EndNote.)

1. Go to litmaps[.]com and log in to your account.

Sign up if you don't have one already.

2. Click on the "+" sign in front of Litmaps in the top-left corner.

Choose a name for your litmap.

Read 26 tweets

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

Nov 23

Chinese company DeepSeek recently introduced R1-Lite, a large language model.

Some people are saying it's cheaper, faster, and better than ChatGPT.

Here's an overview of DeepSeek R1-Lite and its comparison with ChatGPT:

1. Go to deepseek[.]com and click on "Start Now."

Then sign up for a free account.

2. I asked DeepSeek to give me question that could be asked during a Fulbright fellowship interview.

Its answers were quite generic as if it didn't know much about Fulbright.

Perhaps, their training dataset seems quite different from US-made LLMs, which is understandable.

Read 11 tweets

Mushtaq Bilal, PhD

@MushtaqBilalPhD

Nov 20

Finding relevant papers for literature review takes a lot of time.

So, MIT researchers built Undermind, an AI-powered search engine.

It can generate well-researched overviews on any topic and is 10-50 times better than Google Scholar.

Here's how to use it:

1. Go to undermind[.]ai and sign up for a free account.

2. Once you've logged in, this is how Undermind would look like.

Type in the topic of your research project. You can be as vague as possible.

Undermind will you a brief overview about your topic. Then it will ask you to narrow down your topic.