Guidance on Artificial Intelligence

What is AI? AI Benefits and Tips Problems of Using AI AI Tools Citing AI Online Resources and Readings Prompt Guide
What is AI?
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a technological advancement that empowers computers and machines to mimic human intelligence and problem-solving skills. For instance, AI can produce various forms of content, including images, text, audio, and videos.
  • In academic writing, AI tools are mostly used to generate text based on prompts provided by people. As more information becomes accessible, AI learns and improves its ability to predict meaningful responses.
  • ChatGPT is a popular large language model that utilizes extensive datasets to generate progressively sophisticated text responses to questions.
AI Benefits and Tips

AI Benefits

Idea Generation: AI greatly enhances the brainstorming process by offering insights derived from current trends, historical data, and interdisciplinary studies. It can serve as a starting point or a source of inspiration for writers, enabling them to explore various perspectives.
Enhanced Efficiency: AI greatly improves efficiency in academic writing by automating tasks like proofreading and formatting citations, which is particularly beneficial during literature reviews. It quickly identifies relevant sources, extracts key information, and summarizes findings. This speeds up the writing process, allowing researchers to focus on generating content and developing ideas.
Writing Refinement: In academic writing, AI tools are increasingly utilized for proofreading and editing purposes. AI-driven software such as ChatGPT and Grammarly can detect and correct grammatical errors while enhancing writing style. These tools aid in improving clarity and conciseness in manuscripts.

AI Tips

Ask right questions

 

Be specific - asking precise and concise questions increases the likelihood of obtaining a useful answer from the AI tool. For instance, instead of inquiring about 'what is an academic play?', you could ask for an example of a German academic play from the 16th Century.

Train the AI - provide feedback and ask follow-up questions. Large language model AI tools 'learn' and improve their responses through feedback and additional data. If the initial answer you receive is incorrect, inform the AI to help it refine its understanding.

Protect your data - avoid asking questions that include personal or confidential information, as the privacy and security measures of AI tools may be unclear.

 
Check before you use

 

AI tool responses may lack accuracy due to outdated, biased, or incorrect data. Limited access to academic sources may lead to fabricated references or quotes. For instance, AI-generated interviews with celebrities can sound authentic but are entirely fabricated. It is crucial to verify AI-generated content before referencing it in your work.

 
Problems of Using AI
AI Problems
  
When is it safe to use AI?

Inauthentic Sources -- AI errors can create misleading data that appears real and might be used in research articles. If researchers don't check these sources, it can damage scientific credibility and lead to false information spreading in the research community. It's essential to verify AI-generated data to maintain research integrity.

Originality Concerns and Plagiarism -- AI generated content lacks originality critical to academic writing, increasing plagiarism risks. Academic work should reflect personal thoughts, research, or experiences. Using AI to write papers undermines this principle, as it produces work that is not authentically yours, potentially leading to rejection or failing grades due to plagiarism concerns.

AI Biased -- AI systems can contain biases from the data they use, leading to unfairness. In schools, it's important to watch for these biases in AI and expose students to a variety of perspectives and information sources to avoid discrimination.

Over-reliance on AI -- AI can hinder critical thinking skills in students, making them passive learners. Educators must promote independent analysis and questioning beyond AI-generated responses to prevent stunting creativity and innovation. AI, while proficient in pattern-based solutions, may lack the imaginative capacity to encourage out-of-the-box thinking.

  
AI Tools
This list offers an overview of potentially beneficial AI tools for academics and researchers. Explore the various tools and their descriptions to see how they could enhance your research, teaching, or project requirements. Kindly note that the Library does not offer direct support for the tools mentioned in this list.

Scite.ai

Scite offers accurate citations to published papers, presenting detailed lists of cited sources when answering questions. It indicates the number of claims supported or refuted by individuals and journals. Valuable for educators leading writing seminars, Scite enhances research credibility by providing comprehensive citation information and evaluating claims from various sources.

Elicit

Elicit, the research assistant tool utilizes language models to respond to inquiries, drawing knowledge exclusively from research sources. This enables insightful discussions and brainstorming with a reliable, well-informed source. Capable of locating pertinent papers without exact keyword matches, the software can summarize content and extract essential information efficiently.

Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit, a free tool known as the "Spotify of research," helps speed up research. Users create collections of academic papers to get personalized recommendations. It also shows connections between papers and authors in graphs, making it easier to explore topics and dive deeper into research.

Consensus

Consensus is an AI-powered search engine focusing on six topics like economics, sleep, social policy, medicine, and mental health & health supplements. It functions as a blend of ChatGPT and Google Scholar, offering answers to "yes/no" questions based on academic consensus. Users can inquire about relationships between concepts and cause and effect, receiving detailed responses with cited academic papers and summaries.

ChatPDF

ChatPDF employs AI to facilitate natural language interactions with PDFs, offering swift and precise responses. Users can upload PDFs and ask questions conversationally, with the tool extracting information effectively. The AI analyzes the document, responds concisely by referencing relevant text sections, and provides summaries, data points, and insights as needed, enhancing document interaction and information retrieval.

Connected Papers

Connected Papers is a research tool that visually maps connections between papers in a field. By inputting a starting paper, it generates a graph based on an analysis of 50,000 papers, emphasizing strong connections. Users benefit from a visual field overview, identification of popular papers, prevention of missing key research in high-output fields, and exploration of significant prior and derivative work within their area of interest.

YCYW AI

YCYW AI tools are custom-tailored by the YCYW IT R&D Team to enhance education. By utilizing these tools, they support you in various facets of your role and save you valuable time. For instance, ChatGPT 4 can assist you in brainstorming engaging lesson plans, offering explanations on intricate subjects, and even generating quiz questions and assignments. This tool proves to be exceedingly valuable for idea generation and content creation. To access these tools, please click here and log in using your College network login and password (same as your email login details).

Microsoft Copilot

Copilot is a chat interface that helps you find information, write text like emails and summaries, and make images from the words you type.

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an AI tool that responds to user instructions. It's made to understand human-like text, so you can interact with it just like talking to a person. ChatGPT helps with writing code, answering questions, editing text, summarizing content, translating languages, and having conversations on various topics..

Grammerly

Grammerly is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps users improve their writing by identifying and correcting grammar, punctuation, style, and tone issues. It provides real-time suggestions to enhance clarity and effectiveness in written communication across various platforms, making it a valuable tool for writers, students, professionals, and anyone looking to enhance their writing skills.

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion, an advanced text-to-image diffusion model can produce lifelike images from any text input. Utilize the AI Image Generator (Text to Image) at no cost to create stunning visuals seamlessly.
Citing AI
Before incorporating any AI-generated tools in your assignments or research work

 

  • It is advisable to consult with your course instructor or supervisor to seek guidance and approval regarding the utilization of GenAI tools for assignment completion.
  • To think carefully about whether it's suitable. If you need to support a fact or argument, avoid referencing AI-generated information as it can be unreliable and may even invent sources.

If you have utilized ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, please remember the following points:

  • Mention your use of generative AI in the 'Acknowledgements' section of your academic work.
  • Describe how you used the tool in the "Method" section or an equivalent section of your paper.
  • Ensure to include the author of the algorithm in your reference list and cite them within your text.
  • Add the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper so readers can see the exact generated content.

 

Citing AI-generated

content in APA style

 

In-text Citation:

1) Parenthetical citation:

Example: (OpenAI, 2023)

2) Narrative citation:

Example: OpenAI (2023)

Referencing:

Company (Year). AI Name (version) [Descriptor]. URL.

Example:

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. URL

Relevant Resources:

ChatGPT Referencing & Citation

How to cite ChatGPT (apa.org) - APA Style Blog (Nov, 2023)

Online Resource and Readings

In this page, Kidsploration Library presents a curated list of videos and articles to enhance your understanding of AI.

Resources: Online Training Courses

Empower educators to explore the potential of artificial intelligence

Course Description:

This course is designed to help educators confidently navigate the world of AI in education. The content covers essential AI concepts, techniques, and tools, and highlights practical applications to enhance teaching and learning experiences.

Enroll Here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/modules/empower-educators-explore-potential-artificial-intelligence/

Introduction to Generative AI (free online course)

Course Description:

This introductory course offers a comprehensive exploration of Generative AI, including Transformers, ChatGPT for generating text, and Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), the Diffusion Model for generating images.

Enroll Here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/introduction-generative-ai

Generative AI for everyone (free online course)

Course Description:

Instructed by AI pioneer Andrew Ng, Generative AI for Everyone offers his unique perspective on empowering you and your work with generative AI. Andrew will guide you through how generative AI works and what it can (and can’t) do.

Enroll Here: https://www.coursera.org/learn/generative-ai-for-everyone ai

Innovative teaching with ChatGPT (free online course)

Course Description:

Contrary to popular belief, ChatGPT opens up exciting opportunities to enhance innovative teaching and tailor education to individual needs. This course equips educators at all levels, from K-12 to higher education, with practical strategies to enhance their teaching support.

Watch Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ucDee8EVfo ai

Make Teaching Easier with Artificial Intelligence (Chat GPT) (free online course)

Course Description:

In this course, we will teach you how to use tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT to reduce your workload and create more time for teaching.

Enroll Here: https://www.udemy.com/course/make-teaching-easier-with-artificial-intelligence-chat-gpt/ ai

Next-Gen Academic Writing: Master AI Tools and Techniques (free online course)

Course Description:

This course will assist you in mastering AI to enhance the quality of your research papers while maintaining your authorship integrity.

Enroll Here: https://www.udemy.com/course/next-gen-academic-writing-master-ai-tools-and-techniques/ ai

Prompt Guide

What is Prompt?

  • When we communicate with ChatGPT, a prompt is the request we make to the AI. This request can be in the form of a question, command, or description.
  • For instance, if we ask ChatGPT, "What will the weather be like tomorrow?", this sentence is a prompt. The AI will analyze the keywords  in the prompt, such as "tomorrow" and "weather", to understand that we want to know. Then, it will generate a relevant response.
  • Therefore, we can see that the content of the prompt is crucial in interacting with ChatGPT. 

In this section, we provide tips and examples on how to generate an effective prompt.

Strategies to generate an effective prompt

  • Provide Details
    • Provide keywords, details and background information so that the AI can understand your question or command.
    • Define ChatGPT an identity, point-of-view, or profession to help it understand the kind of responses you want from it.
  • Be Clear & Concise
    • Make sure your prompt is clear and concise so that the AI can understand your request.
    • Use simple language and avoid using ambiguous or vague words.
    • Specify the details of the output you want ChatGPT to generate and how it should be generated. E.g. tone, length, style, and structure of the output.
    • Include rules and constraints along with the output specifications, to ensure that the output is in line with your  expectations and requirements.
  • Appropriate Tone
    • Maintain a polite and friendly tone to establish a positive interaction with the AI.
    • Avoid using rude or indifferent language, as this can affect the quality of the AI's response.

Relevant Resource: 

How To Write ChatGPT Prompts | Coursera, 2023


Example of effective prompts