ChatGPT and generative AI text tools
ChatGPT, Google Bard and other language tools are types of chatbot that have been trained on huge amounts of language and data from the internet enabling them to predict text based on patterns they have learnt. These can produce human-like writing extremely quickly based on prompts fed in by the person using the technology. You can feed prompts to generate essays, lesson plans, helpsheets, stories and poems, and all other forms of human text. This is why they are known as 'generative AI'.
Can you use AI tools in your college work ?
- You must check with your teacher to see if generative AI can be used in your work.
- If so, you must reference all parts of the work that were created by the AI tool. Please see the box on Referencing AI for more information. You should never submit any material generated by AI as your own - this is plagiarism. Please see the college's academic misconduct policy here.
- AI tools are not always accurate. They regularly provide inaccurate information, sometimes known as 'AI hallucinations" - you must check all information provided by consulting reliable sources from books, journals, or high quality websites. Our guide on Evaluating Sources will help with this. Any references provided by AI must be checked before using in your assignments - again these can often be false.
Using generative AI tools for research
Unless explicitly told not to use AI tools for research, you can use them to generate ideas for further investigation. Do not rely on these alone - this would be like reading a wikipedia page and only using that. But tools such as ChatGPT can point you to new ideas and areas for further research. Using prompts will help you to decide on what you really need to know. And you can look at the structure of the responses you receive to get ideas for how to present your own work - these tools are very good at logically structuring their replies.
Using generative AI tools to help understand academic literature or concepts
Academic literature (journal articles, academic books) can be difficult to understand. You can use a tool like ChatGPT to help you. Use a prompt such as 'simplify this paragraph' and then paste the difficult text into the text box. Remember that this is just to aid your understanding, and that you will be expected to use academic language in your writing. Other examples include:
- Summarise sources such as journal articles as a study aid
- Explain difficult concepts using the dialogue set-up to keep asking questions until you get an explanation you understand.
- Provide feedback of your work, paragraph structure or grammar
- Reformat text (eg from an article or blog into a tables) to aid comprehension - see this example
- Summaries transcripts, eg from a recorded Teams lesson.
