Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tutorial for Students

Film credit: How did ChatGPT come to be?  University of Arizona Libraries, CC BY 

The number of AI Tools is growing. Here are some recommendations:

Not grounded -- these models rely only on their training data

Grounded - these models can also use web search results or other types of search results 

What is it good for?

• Brainstorming ideas
• Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
• Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand
• Summarizing and outlining
• Asking questions (be sure to fact check the results) You can ask a million questions without fear of being judged.
• Translating text to different languages (not completely fluent in every language)
• Helping write or debug computing code

What is it not so good for?

• Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use Library search, Library databases, or Google Scholar.
  
  Note: You may want to try one of these sites that summarize web search results with generative AI. (But don't use ChatGPT, since it's not connected to web search).
  • Perplexity AI   <-- our top recommendation
  • Microsoft Copilot 
  • Gemini
     
• Finding facts. Search the Web or your Library for this type of information. 
• Asking for any information that would have dire consequences if it was incorrect (such as health, financial, legal advice, and so on). This is because of its tendency to sometimes make up answers, but still sound very confident.