Artificial Intelligence

Talk with your professor about incorporating AI in your course assignments and papers. Early discussions are key to preventing misunderstandings. 

Before using a tool, consider:

• What is the purpose of the tool?
• How is this tool funded? Does the funding impact the credibility of the output?
• What, if any, ethical concerns do you have about this tool? 
• Does the tool ask you to upload existing content such as an image or paper? If so, are there copyright concerns? Is there a way to opt out of including your uploaded content in the training corpus? 
• What corpus or data was used to train the tool or is the tool accessing? Consider how comprehensive the data set is - for example, does it consider paywalled information like that in electronic journals? How recent is the most recent information in the dataset?
• If reproducibility is important to your research, does the tool support it?
• How will you evaluate the information it provides to ensure it is credible?

• Information provided by GenAI tools is sometimes false or outdated.
• When asked to provide references, GenAI tools sometimes make up false references.
• GenAI tools will try to tell you what they believe you want to hear. That means if you write your prompt in a way that reveals your own ideas about a topic, responses will tend to confirm your prior beliefs.

Try it yourself:

Inaccuracies are often more easily spotted by subject experts than novices, because the responses provided usually look plausible. Ask a GenAI tool of interest about a topic you know a lot about - for example, the topic of a test or essay you just got a good grade on - and have a short conversation. How accurate are its responses? Try another GenAI tool. How do the responses compare? 

Prompt writing

When writing your prompt:

• request that sources be provided, so that you can evaluate them.
• use balanced language - for example, asking for both the benefits and drawbacks related to your topic.

Checking the generated text

• Check any sources provided to confirm they are real and authoritative. You can do this by searching the title in the library search bar. Are they appropriate for use in your assignment? If so, read the sources. Were they summarized accurately? 
• Verify information provided through other sources not provided through the GenAI tool. Learn how to find academic sources.