Student Guide to Generative Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI, like ChatGPT, refers to a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content, like text, images, music, or even videos, by learning from existing data. Generative AI is trained on mass amounts of data and uses patterns it has learned to predict and produce new content based on its training data. While it can generate impressive results, it does not truly "understand" the content in a human way; it simply predicts what comes next based on its training data.

For example, generative AI can write essays, generate images, or compose music, but it’s not truly creative or nuanced like humans. Its creations are based on patterns in the data it has seen, so it lacks the personal experience or emotional depth that a human creator would bring to their work. While its output may look or sound similar to real human creations, it’s important to remember that it is more about prediction and less about originality or creativity.

Think of it like a tool that can mimic certain styles or generate content based on rules, but it doesn’t have the true intent or understanding behind the work.

Image Attribution: "Artificial Intelligence" by filedebop, Deviant Art is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

Text adapted from ChatGPT output.

Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things ups (known as "hallucination.")
 

What Is It Good For?

• Brainstorming ideas
• Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
• See Generate Topics for Your Research Paper with ChatGPT. 
• 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 databases, the OneSearch (Library Catalog), or Google Scholar. This may change in the future with more specialized search tools based on LLMs. See I can’t find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?

• 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.

What is prompting?

Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.
 

Tips for writing effective prompts

1. Give it some context or a role to play.
2. Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results formatted.
3. Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways.
4. Do not give it any personal, identifying information.

Examples

1. A role could be, "Act as an expert in [fill in the blank]." 

Act as an expert community organizer.
Act as a high school biology teacher.
Act as a comedian.

2. Example prompt:

Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.
 

3.Example of changes: (keep conversing until you get something useful)

Now give me some sub-topics or research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
 
Or...

I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.

1. Sometimes it gets confused if you change topics in the middle of a conversation. When you want to change the subject, start a new chat.
    
2. It will remember what you've said in the course of a conversation, so you don't have to repeat everything again. Just continue like you're talking to your intern.
    
3. Don't ask ChatGPT (free version) for a list of sources. It will make them up. Instead use Library databases, the OneSearch (Library Catalog), or Google Scholar. See I can’t find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
    
4. Choose an output format. In addition to paragraphs it can give you a table, a bulleted list, ascii art, multiple choice quiz questions, emojis, computer code, and more.
    
5. In ChatGPT you can see a history of your conversations and in the settings you can delete your history and turn off the saving of future history. You can also export your history and save it on your own computer.
    
6. Remember, don't enter any personal, private data in ChatGPT, because OpenAI may use your input to help improve the model. The free version is a research experiment. If you don't want your data used to help improve ChatGPT, you can turn it off in the settings (which means it also won't save your previous chats for your own viewing).

To learn more, try these tutorials about ChatGPT from The University of Arizona Libraries.  They contain short videos (3 min or less), and quiz questions for self-review of what you learned

This guide is based on "Student Guide to ChatGPT" by University of Arizona Libraries is licensed under CC BY 4.0