Student Guide to AI

Submitting content from Generative AI is not your own work. Generative AI is becoming part of many different writing tools, including Grammarly, Google Docs, etc. Be very careful about how you use these tools. 

Many instructors have expertise and tools to inform them when students submit work using AI. 

*Check the syllabus for this information, if not found elsewhere.

Understanding Generative AI and tools such as ChatGPT.

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, 

"...it's a misnomer to call chatbots "artificial intelligence." They're not intelligent by any common definition of the word; they're just good at seeming intelligent to an outsider unaware of the electronic processing inside them -- a simulacrum of human thought, not the product of cogitation.

Chatbots don't create content, as such. They have to be "trained" by pumping their databases full of human-produced content -- books, newspaper articles, junk scraped from the web, etc. All this material allows the bots to generate superficially coherent answers to questions by generating prose patterns and sometimes repeating facts they dredge up from their databases." (Hiltzick)

Hiltzik, Michael. "Perspectives; Who's really winning in Silverman's AI lawsuit?" Los Angeles Times, Feb 21, 2024. ProQuest, https://gwc.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/newspapers/perspectives-whos-really-winning-silvermans-ai/docview/2928743558/se-2.

Learn what it's useful for and how to prompt effectively.

Remember to always verify the information it gives you.

Remember, you'll always need to verify the information because ChatGPT will sometimes make things up (known as "hallucination.")

What is it good for?

• Brainstorming ideas
• Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
  See Generate Topics for Your Research Paper with ChatGPT.
• Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand
• Summarizing and outlining
• Asking questions (be sure to fact-check the results) You can ask a million questions without fear of being judged.
• Translating text to different languages (not completely fluent in every language)
• Helping write or debug computing code
• Humor and improvisation

What is it not so good for?

• It is not good to ask generative AI to write your assignments, because work submitted by a student must be their own.
• Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use Library databases, Google Scholar, or ask a GWC Librarian. This may change in the future with more specialized search tools based on Large Language Models (LLMs - ChatGPT and others). 
• Asking for any information that would have dire consequences if it was incorrect (such as health, financial, legal advice, and so on). This is because of its tendency to sometimes make up answers, but still sound very confident.

What is prompting?

Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.

The way you prompt makes a huge difference in the output that ChatGPT gives you. So it's worth learning some tips.

Always verify the information it gives you: Think of ChatGPT as your personal intern. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.

ChatGPT sometimes makes things up: That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It's not designed to know facts.

Tips for Writing Effective Prompts

1. Give it some context or a role to play.
2. Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results formatted.
3. Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways.

Examples

1. A role could be, "Act as an expert in [fill in the blank]." 
   Act as an expert community organizer.
   Act as a high school biology teacher.
   Act as a comedian.
    
2. Example prompt:
   Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.
    
3. Example of changes: (keep conversing until you get something useful)
   Now give me some sub-topics or research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
    

   Or...

   I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.

If you want to learn more about prompting, try this free course: Learn Prompting

To learn more, try these tutorials about ChatGPT from the University of Arizona Libraries.  They contain short videos (3 min or less), and quiz questions for self-review of what you learned.

1. The technology behind ChatGPT
2. How does ChatGPT aim to prevent harmful use?
3. What is generative AI?
4. Using ChatGPT effectively