AI Chatbots and Research - TC 302: Hunger - Prof. Bizer - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Tools Licensed by UT

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

Researching with AI Chatbots

Good uses:

Brainstorm research topics.
Identify different perspectives or angles on an issue. For example, ask for the pros and cons of a particular policy to address food insecurity and then use what you learn to find research and informed opinions.
Create searches you can use to find sources in library search tools. Ask for boolean search strings for your topic. Boolean is the And/Or logic library databases use.
Translate sources between languages.

Things to Keep in Mind:

Hallucinations: Sometimes AI chatbots make up information or citations to articles. This is called "hallucinating."
Paywalled content and scope of training data: Some chatbots are "grounded in the web," meaning they do a real time web search and use those sources in the response. They provide links to sources which can help you verify accuracy. They are not trained on, nor can they access, the vast majority of scholarly information available through the Libraries. Keep this in mind when doing research on topics where peer-reviewed articles and scholarly books provide the best evidence.
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. It's a good idea to save a copy of anything you plan to cite so your reader can access it.
Ethics, Privacy, etc.: There are numerous issues related to ethics, privacy, bias, labor, and environmental impact outlined on the Ethics and Privacy page of the Libraries' AI guide.

AI Guide

Explore the Artificial Intelligence guide for more information about AI tools, how to evaluate AI output and more.