Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Brainstorm: Chatbot tools such as Microsoft CoPilot and Gemini may be helpful for brainstorming ideas for research topics, organizing your thoughts, jump-starting your work and tackling writer's block.
• Break down concepts: Tools such as Microsoft CoPilot, Gemini and Notebook LM may help you break down and understand a complex concept or assignment prompt.
• Study: Tools such as NotebookLM can create quizzes, study guides, flashcards and audio from your notes or sources.
• Illustrate: AI tools such as GoogleGemini, Midjourney and Dall-e may be helpful for presenting or illustrating your work, including creating videos.
• Create: Many AI tools may be useful for creative adaptations.
• Summarize and Chat with Sources: Many AI tools, including Notebook LM and Microsoft CoPilot, AI literature search, synthesis and visualization tools like ResearchRabbit and Elicit, and AI features in library databases can summarize articles and/or let you ask questions of the article.
• Discover new research: Many literature search, syntheisis and visualization  AI tools such as Research Rabbit and Elicit may help you discover new research in your area and visualize connections between researchers and between research literature.
• Translate: AI tools may help you translate between languages.
• Code: AI tools such as GitHub Copilot may help you generate new code and clean up existing code.

*Microsoft CoPilot, Google Gemini and NotebookLM are licensed by UT.

• Hallucinations: When using AI tools such as Microsoft CoPilot or ChatGPT for research, they may make up credible-sounding citations to sources that do not exist, or give inaccurate information, which is called “hallucinating.” 
• Paywalled content: Literature search tools such as Research Rabbit or Elicit do not have access to the full range or full text of articles that are behind a paywall (access you may have with your EID). They may help with literature searching and with systematic reviews, but cannot fully substitute for a human being with access to this paywalled content. The Ithaka S+R Licensing Agreement Tracker provides details about which publishers have licensed their content to GenAI companies.
• Scope of training data: AI tools can only produce based on the data they have been trained on, so it is important to understand what comprises the training data and the date ranges included. In addition, many AI tools are trained to answer even when they do not know. To minimize this problem, prompt the chatbot to answer "I don't know"  or "I'm not sure" if it is unsure of an answer.
• AI sycophancy: AI tools may agree with, affirm or flatter a user rather than provide objective or truthful responses. 
• Reproducibility: Because generative AI tools such as Microsfot CoPilot and ChatGPT generate new content based on their training data, the content it creates is not reproducible. In addition, because these tools generate new content, you may find that multiple people using the same prompt at the same time will get different results.
• Ethics, Privacy, etc.: There are numerous limitations related to ethics, privacy, bias, labor and environmental impact outlined on the Ethics and Privacy page.
• Legal Context: US laws related to AI tools are evolving, and tools to identify AI-created content are not fully effective. See Copyright page for more information about copright and intellectual property.
• The Office of Academic Technology's Addressing the Limitations of Generative AI for Learning includes additional considerations.