If you’ve decided to use AI in your studies or research (see AI in Practice), plan your usage:
Familiarise yourself with our Information Literacy pages as much of that will be applicable here.
Start by scanning for what generative AI you can access. Some are free, some you have to pay for and some expect payment for advanced features or extended use. Some limit how many prompts you can give it in a certain timeframe. You may already be using one or two different models, but be aware that others may give different results. Understanding how they work will enable you to choose the right one for your purposes.
You will probably have heard of several: ChatGPT and Gemini, for example, but there are others and some are built into software that you may already be using (e.g. Copilot in Microsoft Office). There are specialised models which produce images (e.g. DALL-E, Midjourney & Stable Diffusion for example), computer code (such as OpenAI Codex), video (e.g. Sora), music, molecules (e.g. AlphaFold) and so on.
If you’re using more than one AI, know which models come from the same family to avoid getting similar results. The three main generative AIs are ChatGPT (by OpenAI), Llama (by MetaAI) and Gemini (by Google). There are many others such as Grok (by xAI) and Claude (by Anthropic).
Consider your prompts (the text you type or speak into an AI) and think about the level of detail you want, the kind of output you want. You can get entirely different results by changing the language you use and the focus of your requests. Be careful with what information you put into the AI. It is unwise to provide any sensitive data and you may also be giving away your own intellectual property. Consider asking the AI to respond in a certain manner or at a certain level of scholarship. Some example prompts can be seen on this page
Analyse the results carefully:
- does it make a general kind of sense? Such models are now quite good at being grammatically correct and sounding as if they know what they’re talking about.
- does it contain factual inaccuracies (sometimes called ‘hallucinations’), if your knowledge of the subject is limited be very careful with this, including any data it might offer.
- does it offer references and are they real? AIs can invent extremely convincing reading lists of completely non-existent resources.
- might you do better by searching paid-for Library resources of academic quality?
- can you identify the strengths and weaknesses of the results or are you too reliant on them?
And in the realm of art:
- does the image ‘make sense’ if it needs to?
- look at the hands in particular as AI can be particularly poor at these. Are they what you want?
- does the AI give away that it has plagiarised others’ work by including signatures or logos? (Even if it doesn’t, it does not mean that the image hasn’t been plagiarised).
Consider the originality of the results. Remember that the AI is offering a statistical ‘best fit’ with words which algorithms suggest go together. It is unlikely to be offering you anything that is remotely novel or creative.
Consider again the biases mentioned in the section on ethics to see if there is anything evident in the results you’ve been offered that gives cause for concern.
Prompt the AI further to either revise its suggestions or to go more deeply into a particular aspect. The first response is not always the best and can often be rather bland; prompt it to do better.
Don’t forget to reference your usage. See this page for help on this.
