Using ChatGPT-4 to help engage the public in your writing

Many researchers in Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science find it extremely difficult to translate their research into a form which is accessible to the public. It is important to realize that only 44% of adults in the USA have completed college, and of those only 18% of those were in STEM areas. This means that if you consider the public as a whole only 8% have degrees in STEM fields. Our typical mode of reporting on our research is to use too many buzz words, arcane language, and concepts (such as band structure or crystal symmetry) which are extremely abstract. This makes writing for the public a very challenging and sometimes time consuming task. In this presentation, we will discuss our experience with taking a typical report you might see on the NSF or PhysicsWorld websites and use ChatGPT-4 as a means for quickly making the first pass at this translation. We curate the website FunsizePhysics whose target audience is an enthusiastic middle school student, or someone who graduated from high school. We have found that using a prompt such as “Please take the following text and explain to me what it means as if I were a Middle School Student” can be an extremely effective and fast means for translating extremely technical text in a way which at least begins to be accessible to a middle school student. It is possible to take that translation by ChatGPT and then edit it into a final form. Our preliminary estimate is that it can save nearly a factor of four in the time required to translate something written for the NSF or PhysicsWorld in a way which is accessible and interesting to our target audience.