Dear Commons Community,
Kirk Daulerio alerted me to this piece that compares ChatGPT with Mainstay. ChatGPT has gotten a lot of attention in recent months especially among educators for its ability to provide quick essays on a wide variety of topics. Mainstay, which has been available for several years, bills itself as “a student engagement platform powered by behaviorally intelligent chatbots. It is purpose-built to positively influence students and guide them throughout their academic journeys.” It can be used for a number of student support activities such as applications/admissions, counseling, and academic support. A focus of Mainstay is “to boost enrollment, improve retention, and close equity gaps.”
Below is a comparison of the two chatbots courtesy of Mainstay.
The entire article is informative and portends the future of chatbots in higher education.
Tony
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ChatGPT
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Mainstay
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Solely reactive.
Like many other chatbots, ChatGPT generates text in response to individual prompts. What if you could use ChatGPT’s language generation capabilities and proactively reach out to students to suggest that they take action? |
True two-way engagement.
Mainstay does much more than automatically answer student questions. Our partners also use our platform to proactively engage target audiences with the right information at the moment it’s needed (like before a key deadline.) Our Best Practice Collections offer partners a full calendar of proven, research-backed communications to spark student progress and drive positive outcomes. |
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Lacks human intervention or checks and balances.
ChatGPT advises its users, “The system may occasionally generate incorrect or misleading information and produce offensive or biased content.” Because it is built to generate answers based on prediction, it will sometimes guess or create answers that sound reasonable, but are inaccurate or potentially inappropriate. On its own, ChatGPT does not allow for human intervention to ensure that its responses are accurate and reflect well on your institution. |
Accurate answers that keep a human in the loop.
It’s true that Mainstay’s bots cannot answer as broad a range of questions as ChatGPT. However, we are 100% confident that the answers our chatbots deliver contain accurate information because they have been finely tuned for each partner’s needs by our expert [human] team. Our AI is transparent and admits when it cannot answer questions, which ensures that a person can provide an accurate answer and expand the bot’s relevant knowledge with usage over time. When our platform detects that a person needs to get involved because the AI cannot answer a question accurately or because a student is asking about a sensitive topic, we flag the question or conversation so that a person can seamlessly take over the conversation. |
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Potential vulnerability to bias.
AI models are only as good as the data they are trained on. Any deficiencies — such as bias, intentional or not — in the dataset may be mirrored in the text it generates. A model like ChatGPT that is trained on a dataset of typical conversations rather than the most supportive responses can only generate language reflective of typical dialogue, not best practices. But what if an AI with ChatGPT’s language generation capabilities was trained specifically to support improved equity in higher education? |
A focus on historically underserved students.
From our inception, we have designed our platform to improve access and equity for first-generation, minority, low-income, and non-traditional students. We provide not only the technology to have automated conversations with students, but also the messaging shown to have the greatest impact on outcomes for all students. |
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