Medicine

When seeking information and looking for published research, you will draw on multiple sources of information including textbooks, journal literature, library databases, and search engines.  AI is another evolving tool for literature searching.

But, just as with all information seeking strategies, when using an AI tool to gather information about a topic, critical appraisal is an important part of the process.  You should look carefully at the AI outputs:

• evaluate the accuracy of the output by verifying it with additional sources
• determine the relevancy of the information to your information need
• assess whether the information is the current understanding of the topic
• make sure the information comes from a legitimate and vetted source (with a verifiable citation from an academic/evidence-based source)
• dig down into the cited source(s) of the AI output rather than blindly trusting the AI summary

Some Precautions When Using AI

• Beware of hallucinations - AI tools can make up credible-sounding citations to sources that do not exist.
• Free AI tools can and will use your inputs and your personal data for training purposes.
• Free AI tools will only be able to source from information found on the open web, thus the outputs will be missing relevant information from pay-walled content. (Note: there is ongoing litigation in the courts regarding some AI companies allowing their AI tools to ingest copyrighted material and whether this is allowable under the fair-use doctrine of copyright law).
• If you use a free AI tool, you cannot upload any copyrighted material into the tool without permission from the copyright holder if the tool will be saving or scraping the content.
• You can use AI tools to create learning material for private study or for classroom use if it is a subscribed tool that will not save the uploaded content & prompts, or use them for training the tool.  UT Provides Microsoft Copilot, which abides by these restrictions and has been vetted to ensure compliance with applicable privacy and security standards.
• Most AI tools are NOT PHI, HIPAA or FERPA compliant, meaning you should never enter patient data into the tool.