AI Literacy

Why do I need to learn this?

With the rapid development of generative AI, or generative artificial intelligence, since the end of 2022, tools using Large Language Models or generative art have become freely available and offer images and text which students may want to use in their study and their assignments. You may also find they are increasingly used in the workplace and need to be prepared for that.

It is important to grasp how these AI tools work in order to avoid any possibility of plagiarism. It is also important to understand whether it is ethical to use them at all for a variety of reasons.

These pages will help you:

recognize AI in the world around you and have an appreciation of its impact;
recognize different kinds of AIs;
understand how AI works at a basic level and how much intelligence AI has;
understand AIs’ strengths and weaknesses;
better develop your prompt engineering;
consider various ethical issues such as hallucinations, bias, accountability, transparency, and reasonable academic use.

See also our Library Guide on Using Generative AI in coursework or research:

Understanding AI Basics

AI in Practice

Ethical Considerations

Developing AI Literacy

Resources and Further Learning

Referencing work which uses generative AI

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If you are using outside sources in your work, you should be referencing it. This includes generative AI which must be referenced if you use it. You may also wish to describe your usage of such tools in any sections of your work explaining methodology.

See here for help with referencing generative AI usage

You will also find links there to the University of Portsmouth guidance on the use of AI.

BUT

Check your lecturers will accept such usage. They are marking your work and deciding what counts as plagiarism, not the Library! Also note that there are tools which may detect the use of generative AI.

Be very careful about using AI to suggest references to read or to cite. Be aware that ChatGPT and other AI services currently produce incorrect or made-up references that cannot be sourced, although there are signs that they are becoming better at this.

Some individual parts of an AI-generated reference may be accurate (such as the journal name, article or book title or an author) but the whole reference does not always exist and so cannot be found by our Library team. These are sometimes called ‘hallucinations’ but it is not true to say that LLMs are misrepresenting the world as they see it, it is more that they are not attempting to provide truth but to provide something that looks correct. See Hicks, M. T., Humphries, J., & Slater, J. (2024). ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics & Information Technology, 26(2), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 for more on this.

If you have a reference that you cannot find, our team may ask where it came from so that we can ensure it is legitimate before attempting to locate it.