Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Always verify the information it gives you, because generative AI tools will sometimes make things ups (known as an AI hallucination.)

When to use:

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

When not to use:

• Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use QuickSearch, Library databases, or Google Scholar.
• 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 hallucinate, but still sound very confident.

What is prompting?
It's what you type into the chat box.

The way you prompt makes a huge difference in the output you get. Some tips:

Always verify the information it gives you.
Think of generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, as your hired assistant. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.

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]," for example, a community organizer, a high school biology teacher, a comedian, etc.
    
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.

Learn Prompt Design:

AI hallucination is a phenomenon wherein a large language model (LLM) - often a generative AI chatbot or computer vision tool - perceives patterns or objects that are nonexistent or imperceptible to human observers, creating outputs that are nonsensical or altogether inaccurate.

What Are AI Hallucinations? | IBM

Don't enter any private or confidential information into ChatGPT and other generative AI tools. It’s possible that developers may use your entries to improve the next version of their model. 

If you want to make sure your inputs aren't used to improve the model, you can turn off that feature in the settings of ChatGPT.

• Click on your name
• then Settings
• then Data controls
• and turn off the switch called “improve the model for everyone.” 

Temporary chat
Another option is to use the feature called “temporary chat.” Then your chat won’t appear in your history and ChatGPT won’t (presumably) save anything from your conversation.

You can do the same in other tools.

Bias is defined as "prejudice in favor of or against one thing, person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair."

Artificial Intelligence can have possible biases that it may produce in the instance of only providing information that is the most recent, has the most peer reviews, or provides information specific to only one demographic. 

Generative AI is known to produce bias and users should be aware that not all data is presented equally.