Week Five Reflection

This week, I was assigned to use ChatGPT to aid in my hunt for research. However, this time, I found using ChatGPT to be a great difficulty.

I initially copied the format Professor Haas recommended we use. I specifically used the words "true story" just like in the description of the assignment page. Unfortunately, ChatGPT was not giving me the answers I needed. Time after time, I was getting a repeated response. After receiving an anecdote, I would ask the AI to verify the truth behind the story, and its response was that the story was a "fictional narrative."

Over time, this got extremely frustrating and irritating. I did find a possible solution - removing the words "true story" in my initial request (for example, I would ask for the AI to tell me about foxes and communication). Once I got that answer, I would then ask the AI to find a tru anecdote related to that topic.

I am not sure why the recommended line did not work for me, but I was able to problem solve. However, I still did not find that ChatGPT gave good results, and I may not use any of the anecdotes given.

I found a story on foxes in Yellowstone following gray wolves and eating their leftovers. I found that to be relevant to my research as I was to learn more about foxes adaptability.

Besides ChatGPT, I have been using twitter regularly. I recently read an anecdote about a woman named Taylor Mitchell who was killed by coyotes. Shawn Lee wrote this post to remind readers that coyotes are becoming more prevalent in urban areas, and we should be aware!

One new profile I have followed is Eniko Kubinyi (@KubinyiEniko), who is a Senior researcher at Eötvös Loránd University. Eniko recently posted about a comprehensive study done about people's reactions to wolves. The findings were interesting - while joy and anger had a lot of influence on reactions, fear was only half the time as joy. This means that more people find joy in seeing a wild wolf than fear. I found this to be interesting because it teaches us a lot about human reactions to "scary, wild" animals.

I also responded to one of Vinay Raja's blog posts, where he recommended some research articles. Vinay used the UCSB library and found an interesting article on the behaviors of Arctic Wolves in response to humans. The research suggested that Arctic wolves were there due to curiosity, and had no intention of harming the humans. While I am not studying wolves, I may want to see if foxes act similarly in the presence of humans.