Hallucinations: Sometimes AI chatbots make up information or citations to articles. This is called "hallucinating."
Paywalled content and scope of training data: ChatGPT and other chatbots aren't trained on the vast majority of scholarly information available through the Libraries. Keep this in mind when doing research, where peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books provide the best evidence. It is helpful to try to figure out the scope of training data for a chatbot you are using, so you know how current it is as well.
Reproducibility: AI chatbots are designed to create content on the fly in response to your prompt. That means you won't get the same results twice. This is a particular problem when trying to cite your sources because there is nothing stable you can point to in your citations.
Ethics, Privacy, etc.: There are numerous limitations related to ethics, privacy, bias, labor, and environmental impact outlined on the Ethics and Privacy page of the Libraries' AI guide.
Website: https://gemini.google.com/
Uses: Generates text, images and code.
Cost: Free through UT with your UT Mail Google for Education account (your utexas.edu account)
Access: Make sure you are logged into your utexas account and navigate to the Gemini page.
User Privacy: When using GoogleGemini with your utexas (Google for Education) account, your data is protected. It is not currently approved for use with confidential university data (e.g., FERPA, HIPAA, PCI, IRB).
Additional information: https://tech.utexas.edu/initiatives/artificial-intelligence
Website: https://copilot.microsoft.com/
Uses: Generates text, code, and images using ChatGPT and DALL-E. Includes links to some web resources.
Cost: Free through UT
Access: Log in with your UT Microsoft 365 account (@austin.utexas.edu) and then your EID to access the UT-Austin licensed version of CoPilot.
User Privacy: When using CoPilot licensed through UT, your prompts and responses are not retained by Microsoft or used to train AI models, and your information is encrypted. It is not currently approved for use with confidential university data (e.g., FERPA, HIPAA, PCI, IRB).
Additional information: UT Microsoft 365 AI page.
Website: https://spark.utexas.edu/
Uses: UT’s all-in-one AI platform includes a chatbots and specialized agents. Ability to build your own agents is coming soon.
Cost: Free for students, faculty and staff.
Access: Sign in with your UT Microsoft account.
User Privacy: Your data is not used to train AI models or shared with vendors. It is stored at UT. See the UT Spark Usage & Data Privacy Guide.
Additional information: UT Spark Training and Documentation
Explore the Artificial Intelligence guide for more information about AI tools, how to evaluate AI output and more.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.