Artificial Intelligence and your learning

Remember that any generative AI tool should be used as exactly that, a tool. It should be something that helps to make your studying more efficient or inspires you to develop your own ideas. It should not be used as a service that you outsource the difficult aspects of your course to.

Undertaking a university degree is not just about completing essays. You will gain valuable research, critical thinking and creative skills by fully engaging with the course and challenging yourself. If you use an AI tool to do the hard work for you, you will be depriving yourself of the opportunity to develop those skills.

Sometimes, the use of AI tools may be allowed or even required by an assignment brief. In those cases, make sure you follow the guidelines given in the brief, and use the relevant AI tool in the way that you been asked to. If you are in doubt about what is allowed, ask your lecturer.

You should treat all output from generative AI tools with scepticism. Always apply your own perspective and critical thinking skills to judge the accuracy, relevancy, impartiality, and suitability of the output. Never take what the AI tool says at face value; remember to double-check any ‘facts’ that the tool produces using a reliable academic source.

When considering any ‘arguments’ put forward by an AI tool, critically assess these ideas just as you would when reading an academic source. For example:

• Is the line of argument convincing?
• How does this compare or contrast to what actual sources in this field say?
• Is the evidence cited relevant and true?

You should also consider the fact that many AI tools have been trained on datasets that may be inherently biased. For example, English language and Western-centric internet content.

Ultimately, you need to keep in mind that the words have not been written by a human being, and there is no 'thought’ behind them. The actual thinking needs to come from you! 

Unless advised otherwise by your tutors, Generative AI tools should only be used for generating stimulus and ideas, or to support your learning, rather than producing content you will use directly in your submission.

Presenting someone, or something, else’s work as if it is your own is plagiarism and is a form of academic misconduct. This includes content from Generative AI. 

If you are permitted to use Generative AI tools during your assessment, you should ensure you keep track of, and cite, your use of them throughout the assessment process. It is important to be open and honest about how you have used these tools to contribute to your final submission. We recommend keeping a record of any Generative AI use in preparation for an assignment, including tools and prompts used and responses received.

For guidance on citing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, visit the Cite Them Right website's examples:

• Citing Artificial Intelligence tools

Examples are given for the main referencing styles used at York St John. You should also ensure you follow any guidelines in the assignment brief with regards to acknowledging the use of Generative AI.

Be aware of any terms and conditions applying to the data you provide to an AI tool. For instance, some generative AIs use user prompts and other data to make improvements to the software or to future versions. As with many free technologies, the data you provide may be the real cost of using the tool. 

Staff and students must comply at all times with applicable copyright law and appropriate consents and licences. It is inappropriate and possibly illegal to enter into Generative AI tools any copyright, proprietary or confidential information.

• ChatGPT is Open AI’s large language model (LLM) text generation tool. ChatGPT 3.5 free version generates large amounts of text from a single topic and style request. Paid version 4.0 allows uploading of PDFs to allow more intelligent output.
• Gemini, previously known as Bard, is Google’s AI chatbot and can be integrated with other Google apps. Free version available with limitations.

• Goblin Tools is a free tool which will break down tasks for you into a to-do list. It is very helpful if you are struggling to get started on a project or find organisation and planning overwhelming. It also has a Judge tool for checking the tone of your writing and Formalizer for changing your writing to be more professional.

• Semantic Scholar is an AI-powered search engine that specialises in finding scientific papers. It is useful for research alongside other search tools such as the library search and Google Scholar.
• Elicit and Consensus are tools that will search for academic references on your project title and provide short summaries of their findings. It is useful as a starting point for research. They both use Semantic Scholar as a basis for searching so may miss references only available elsewhere.
• Perplexity is a tool that can provide detailed answers to questions on a particular topic, providing references. It is useful as a starting point for research. Most references tend to be news sites or general websites rather than academic sources.
• Research Rabbit and Keenious allow you to provide these tools with a research paper or papers and they will find other related papers. Research Rabbit has integration with Zotero and provides a visualisation of research in the area. It is particularly useful if you are conducting a literature review.
• Scite has a free version with limited prompts. It includes links to articles for researchers to read and it has a good summary of papers.

Humata and ChatPDF are both free AI tools where you can upload a research paper and get a short summary of the content. A virtual research assistant will then answer your questions about the paper, highlighting where they found the answers.

These tools can be useful for aiding in the active reading process although you should always check information provided for accuracy against the paper itself.

• Jenni.ai is a free text generator up to 200 words per day. For more words, a subscription is required. It starts by asking what you are writing and with a few prompts provides you with sentences to accept or customise. Citations can also be added to the text.

• Canva has Magic Studio which enables you to generate images and videos using a free trial with a chance to upgrade for more features.
• Adobe Photoshop has Next-generation AI available in beta. A free version is available. Currently all staff have access at York St John and some students also have access, depending on their course.

• Generative AIs tend to perpetuate biases, based on the data it has been trained on. They normally use data from the internet which may include instances of racism, sexism, homophobia and other biases, and as a result, these biases can emerge in their outputs. Because most of their data relate to the Western world and the experiences of more privileged individuals living there, they may reflect this more in their responses than the experiences of those from the Global South or from marginalised groups.

• There are concerns about the environmental impact of using Generative AIs since they require large amounts of computer processing power to operate.

• There are also ethical issues with how some Generative AI tools are trained. For instance, OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, used low-paid Kenyan workers to identify offensive speech produced by the AI to filter these out of the final product. Many reported finding this work traumatising.

• There are also concerns over copyright as many Generative AI tools base their responses on training data where the original content creators have not consented for their work to be used. This has led some content creators to sue OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, including the New York Times, Getty Images and various authors. OpenAI have responded that it would be impossible to train AI tools without use of copyright content and that their usage constitutes fair use.