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AI Literacy & Help Guide

AI Literacy & Help Guide

 

What is ChatGPT Good For and Not Good For?

 Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things ups (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

What is it not so good for?

  • Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use Library search, Library databases, or Google Scholar

    Note: You may want to try one of these tools that summarize web search results with generative AI. 
  • 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.

Prompting

 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.

Fact-checking AI

 AI "hallucination"


The official term in the field of AI is "hallucination." This refers to the fact that it sometimes "makes stuff up." This is because these systems are probabilistic, not deterministic.
 

ChatGPT Often Makes Up Fictional Sources


One area where ChatGPT usually gives fictional answers is when asked to create a list of sources. See the Twitter thread, "Why does chatGPT make up fake academic papers?" for a useful explanation of why this happens.

Since we've had many questions from students about this, we offer this FAQ:
I can’t find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
 

There is progress in making these models more truthful


However, there is progress in making these systems more truthful by grounding them in external sources of knowledge. Some examples are Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity AI, which use internet search results to ground answers. However, the Internet sources used, could also contain misinformation or disinformation. But at least with Copilot and Perplexity you can link to the sources used to begin verification.
 

Discuss the use of ChatGPT with students

You can help students care about being transparent in their use. Discuss ChatGPT and create a policy for whether and how to use it.

Help students understand why giving credit is important

Go beyond traditional citations

Professor Ethan Mollick (Wharton School), recommends going beyond traditional citations. He asks his students to include an appendix to their papers, where they list each prompt they used in ChatGPT and discuss how they revised those prompts to get better output.

See: Mollick, Ethan R. and Mollick, Lilach, Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts (March 17, 2023).

Citation guidelines

Here are the guidelines for citing generative AI in MLA StyleAPA Style, and Chicago Manual of Style.

It's also worth reading this advice, since some uses don't fit the standard way of citing: 

Publisher policies

Here are some statements from academic publishers about the use of generative AI.

  • Science Journals policy: "Text generated from AI, machine learning, or similar algorithmic tools cannot be used in papers published in Science journals"
  • Nature publishers: "... researchers using LLM tools should document this use in the methods or acknowledgements sections.”
  • Taylor & Francis 
  • Cambridge University Press.
    • AI use must be declared and clearly explained in publications such as research papers, just as we expect scholars to do with other software, tools and methodologies.

    • AI does not meet the Cambridge requirements for authorship, given the need for accountability. AI and LLM tools may not be listed as an author on any scholarly work published by Cambridge

    • Authors are accountable for the accuracy, integrity and originality of their research papers, including for any use of AI.

    • Any use of AI must not breach Cambridge’s plagiarism policy. Scholarly works must be the author’s own, and not present others’ ideas, data, words or other material without adequate citation and transparent referencing.

      Please note, individual journals may have more specific requirements or guidelines for upholding this policy.

Other publishers are also coming out with statements like these.

More Tips

  1. Sometimes it gets confused if you change topics in the middle of a conversation. When you want to change the subject, start a new chat.
     
  2. It will remember what you've said in the course of a conversation, so you don't have to repeat everything again. Just continue like you're talking to your intern.
     
  3. Don't ask ChatGPT (free version) for a list of sources. It will often make them up. Instead use library search, library databases, or Google Scholar.
     
  4. Choose an output format. In addition to paragraphs it can give you a table, a bulleted list, ascii art, multiple choice quiz questions, emojis, computer code, and more.
     
  5. In ChatGPT you can see a history of your conversations. You can go back to a previous conversation and continue it. If you like, in the settings you can delete your history and turn off the saving of future history. You can also export your history and save it on your own computer.
     
  6. Remember, don't enter any personal, private data in ChatGPT, because OpenAI may use your input to help improve the model. The free version is a research experiment.  If you don't want your data used to help improve ChatGPT, you can turn it off in the settings. Go to your name, then Settings, then Data Controls and turn off, "Improve the model for everyone."

 


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