Polymathic and Health Science Scholars

Generative AI tools have exploded since 2023. Many scholars are finding new and interesting ways put these technologies to use. 

You might decide to use generative text tools to assist you in your coursework for this class by using a chatbot to brainstorm ideas. 

Beneficial Uses of Generative AI Tools (especially for your thesis)

• Brainstorming ideas for research topics, organizing your thoughts, jump-starting your work and tackling writer's block.
• Narrowing down a broad research topic by asking the tool for related research concepts.
• Generate related keywords or phrases to use in databases. 
• Break down concepts to help you understand a complex concept or assignment prompt.

Limitations of Generative AI Tools

• Hallucinations: When using AI tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini 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.
• 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. For example, as of 2023, ChatGPT 3.5 (free version) is only trained on content ingested from the open, non-paywalled Web through December 2021.

Prompt engineering is all about asking the ChatBot tool the right questions to get the most useful results. Because ChatBot tools are not designed to give accurate answers, only to sound like a human, it makes sense to cross-reference information obtained from a ChatBot in trusted sources as a general rule. In prompt engineering, you want to be detailed enough with your question so that the ChatBot tool can respond appropriately. 

Guidelines for prompt engineering: 

1.) Tell the ChatBot the voice you'd like it to take. 

2.) Be concise, yet detailed with your question. 

3.) Continue conversing with the tool to iterate upon the response. 

Example:

Act like an academic research librarian responding to an undergraduate student. I'm writing a term paper investigating medical disparities in rural America. Please generate some concepts related to this topic that I might search in a literature database. 

Microsoft CoPilot

• The University of Texas at Austin has licensed a version of Microsoft CoPilot. 
• Log in with your UT Microsoft 365 account (@austin.utexas.edu) and then your EID to access the UT-Austin licensed version of CoPilot. Your prompts and responses are not retained by Microsoft or used to train AI models, and your information is encrypted.
• Generates text, code, and images using ChatGPT-4 and DALL-E 3.

ChatGPT:

• The basic tier is free but requires an OpenAI account. An upgraded version is available for $20 per month.
• Generates text responses and code using the Common Crawl open dataset and resources like Wikipedia, books, and news articles.
• ChatGPT will collect personal information and user behavior data that it can share with partners. See privacy policy.

Gemini:

• The tool is free but requires a Google account to access. 
• Gemini generates text responses and code. It was trained on a large dataset, but we don't know more specific information. 
• The tool will save and share data with other Google products if linked. See Gemini privacy policy.