AI & Research - UGS 302: Tales of the Trojan War - Rabinowitz - LibGuides at University of Texas at Austin

Gen AI Tools at 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://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

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.

Doing Research with Gen AI Chatbots

Ask for citations or links and then verify they exist. Althought they are getting better, AI chatbots sometimes "hallucinate" sources, meaning they make up sources that don't exist.
Just as you should do with any source of information, evaluate it. This includes finding the information in other credible sources.
Be aware of what is and is not included in the data corpus used to train the chatbot and whether it is "grounded in the web," which means whether it uses web search results in its responses. Make sure the timeframe and type of information it is trained on matches your information need. Keep in mind that chatbots like ChatGPT and GoogleGemini are not trained using the majority of information found in paywalled journals and schoarly books.
If you are going to use the information generated by a chatbot, be sure to cite it. Here are some ways to cite in MLA, APA and Chicago style. You may want to save what was generated because it is not reproducible. That means the reader cannot use the citation to get back to the information you used unless you provide it.

AI Guide

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