Henri Matisse was the highlight of my final project in a class my senior year of highschool, thus this required me to spend countless hours researching, analyzing and learning the different eras, and aspects of this renowned author’s life. I couldn’t help but feel a little defeated and jealous when I typed in “The life of Henri Matisse ” into chat GPT to find that the software curated a well written summarization of what seemed to be my research in about five seconds. Although the post does not contain as much detail as one would need to create a research paper of Matisse, Chat GPT highlights the importance of Matisse’s work on modern art by giving a brief description of his some of his work notably “The Snail” (1953) is one of his famous cut-out pieces. Influences and Inspirations: Matisse drew inspiration from a wide range of sources, including African and Islamic art.” and depicts elements of Matisse’s personal life such as “He initially studied law but began to pursue art seriously after an illness in 1890”. I think that the response clearly resembles the impact in which Henri Matisse’s life had on art by naming and describing his important contributions of style to the art world. However, after I asked the software about his life, I was surprised that the majority of the information was solely about his art and only bits about his personal life, which in my opinion is what I classify as someone’s rather than just their work.
I think that the importance of the question I asked is that if I were to in fact ask Chat GBT, “tell me about Henri Matisse’s painting The Green Stripe” or “Did Henri Matisse’s family impact his work”, I may have received a very different, many more detailed answer.
After using the source, I began to ponder on how the tool would be used in different settings and which of those settings would be appropriate for chat GBT to be used along with which setting would be beneficial for the user. I think that in a classroom setting, hypothetically where students would be learning about the life of Herny Matisse, I do not think that the software would be beneficial given the students would miss information about his life given the source mostly provided information about his art, and they would most likely be copying the information for an assignment and not actually learning. However, I thought about this source in a professional setting where a person who is already informed about Henri Matisse would need to insert information about him in their work. This tool might be helpful given it would likely speed up a process. I think Sharon Aschaiek illustrated this thought well “Chat GPT can automate some aspects of your work- among them research you conduct to shape your strategy and content (although its important to know it has limited knowledge of the world after 2021)” in her essay Promises and Pitfalls of Chat GPT.
Ultimately, I think that the chat GPT can be used as a beneficial tool for those who are already informed on a topic, thus making the tool strictly a writing tool, and not one that can be used to plagiarize work and claim it as one’s own.
Works cited
Aschaiek, Sharon. “Promises and Pitfalls of ChatGPT.” Insider Higher Ed, 31 Jan. 2023, app.perusall.com/courses/2023-fall-introduction-to-academic-writing-engl-110-25/promises-and-pitfalls-of-chatgpt.