Your Critical AI Toolkit
Part 1: What and where is Generative Artificial Intelligence?
How to describe and identify Generative Artificial Intelligence and different kinds of AI tools.
/prod01/yorksjacuk/media/content-assets/safe-images/1600-x-1000/AI.jpg)
What is Generative AI?
Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, are tools that use machine learning techniques to produce content, including text, images and sound, based on prompts. Although we use the term 'artificial intelligence', they are not actually capable of thought or reasoning, they just do a very convincing job of mimicking human language patterns or creative efforts.
ChatGPT and similar text-producing tools are tools that connect you to Large Language Models (LLMs), meaning that the algorithm behind them has been trained on a large set of existing text, usually taken from the internet and other sources. They then use what they have 'learned' from this data about language patterns to generate new text based on the prompt provided.
You can think of ChatGPT and similar tools as a very sophisticated form of predictive text because they use complex maths to determine which word should come next in the text they are producing, based on the words that have come before and on the probabilities of what word should follow it. They cannot 'think' about the answer to the question, and they have been known to 'hallucinate' incorrect information.
Task: Watch this 2 minute video by KI-Campus to learn more about what Generative AI is.
Critical thinking questions
- Do you know what text and data has been used to train AI? Can you find out? How might that impact what AI thinks is the most probable response?
- What benefits are there to AI giving you the most likely, probable responses? What are the problems with this?
- If AI tools are not thinking and do not know things, to what extent should you trust them without questioning? Why do you think that?
Questions for those who teach, support and/or assess learning
- How confident do you feel in answering questions about AI? Can you identify gaps in your knowledge and make a plan to develop your knowledge?
- How could you use this toolkit to support your teaching?
- Who/what are your other trusted sources for AI knowledge?
We will explore these kinds of questions in more detail in Part 2 of this Toolkit.
Principles to guide your decision making and use of AI
York St John University has its own position on Generative AI which should form the basis for decision making and using AI in the context of learning. This position is based upon the foundations of:
- Fairness, transparency and academic integrity
- Social justice and challenging prejudice
- Security, privacy and intellectual property
- Inclusivity and digital access
- Empowerment and partnership
- Evaluation and review
Task: Before continuing with this toolkit, read the Guidance for students on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence to understand what these mean in the context of your learning.
This toolkit is designed to help you make decisions in a range of contexts inside and outside York St John University, and these central foundations are important for all these contexts. This toolkit uses these principles to support you to engage critically with AI.
There is no single definitive decision we will provide in this toolkit to tell you whether you can use AI. You will need to make those decisions in each context you are in, informed by our principles, by specific instructions and guidance (such as assignment briefs, employer rules, disciplinary or sector expectations), your own ethical views, and your technological access and skills. Informed by this information, your decisions on using AI may be different between each task or assignment, between each project, between each employer or sector, and between each country.
Critical thinking questions
- To what extent do these principles align with your values?
Questions for those who teach, support and/or assess learning
- To what extent do these principles align with your own pedagogic values? What strategies do you use to navigate and resolve pedagogic tensions?
Identifying AI in tools you use
With AI in the news and being marketed on social media by companies and influencers, it can feel overwhelming to keep track of where AI is in use in tools, services, software, websites and apps. Being able to identify if AI is being used by a tool is a useful skill to develop and it is important for you to declare in academic and professional work if you have used it.
Task: Use Google to search for a topic or a question, and identify where the AI summary is in the search results. How has Google indicated that it is an AI summary?
Many technology companies acknowledge the risks of AI as well as promote its benefits to you. This means that companies may provide you some transparency about AI in their tools by:
- Adding headings and tags to content such as 'AI summary', 'AI overview', 'AI generated'. You might also see 'natural language' in search engine instructions, or AI help tools branded as a 'research assistant'.
- Adding disclaimers to content, such as "This content is AI generated and may not be accurate".
- Adding AI tags or icons to features and functions which are AI-powered, such as icons of AI letters, robots, magic wands, or stars.
- Marketing the product clearly as an AI tool, or tool with some AI features.
- Having their product website URL end with .ai
Some companies may not be as transparent and AI may be hidden or disguised.
Critical thinking questions
- Do you think it's important to be able to identify if AI is being used by a tool? Why or why not? Do other people think it is important (for example your lecturers, your employers, your customers)?
- Do you feel confident to identify if a tool is using AI? How might you use our suggestions above to identify the presence of AI?
- How else could you find out whether AI is in a tool? Could you search for the tool name and 'AI' and check their websites, brochures, product documentation or help pages?
Questions for those who teach, support and/or assess learning
- How prevalent is AI in disciplinary tools that your students need to use (such as academic research databases, learning environments, and analysis software)? How can you find out, and is that important for you to know? Will that impact a competency you are assessing?
- If students may use AI without realising, how might you maintain your academic integrity judgements focused on intent?
Library of AI tools
There are many AI tools available and many more in development. This is just a small selection of the tools available which York St John University staff have explored to understand how they work, what they can do, and their limitations. This list is not provided as an endorsement of a specific tool, but to show you the breadth of tools available and build your overall awareness.
There are tools with many capabilities, which we have called multi-purpose AI chatbots and tools designed to achieve more specific aims, which we have called AI tools for specific purposes.
Cybersecurity advice: When using any tools that require you to create an account, you must not use your York St John email address and university password, or use the same personal email address and password for other systems.
Please choose a personal email address and unique password, or follow specific instructions from any employer if using an AI tool at work. Microsoft Copilot is provided by York St John University, so staff and students can access it with your university IT account.
This advice will help keep your online identity safe and secure.
Multi-purpose AI chatbots
There are many AI chatbots which bring together access to several AI models into one chat interface, giving them the ability to produce text, images, graphs and charts, audio, do data analysis, analyse images, and more. These tools have wider capabilities and may have fewer boundaries in what they have been instructed to do, so you need to give them instructions and learn how to make those instructions more effective (we will explore this in Part 3). These chatbots provide you with the interface to communicate with a Large Language Model (LLM) without needing to learn specific query languages.
At York St John University, we provide and support Microsoft Copilot. This is Microsoft's AI chatbot. York St John University staff and student have access to a basic version of Microsoft Copilot through our institutional Office 365 accounts - this is called Microsoft Copilot Chat. This version has limits on the number of characters in your prompts and the size of files you can upload. More advanced capabilities of Copilot exist in personal and enterprise subscriptions to Microsoft products. When using Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat at York St John, it's important to understand what information Copilot can and cannot access, and what happens with that information.
What can Copilot access?
Copilot operates within the boundaries of your existing Microsoft 365 permissions. This means it can access your:
- Emails
- Calendar entries
- Teams chats
- OneDrive files
- Documents in apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint
- Content that has been shared with you through platforms like SharePoint or Teams
It cannot access content belonging to others at York St John University (staff or students) unless they have explicitly shared it with you. Additionally, Copilot does not have access to files stored outside of Microsoft 365, such as those saved on your local desktop or in personal cloud storage. In short, Copilot sees what you see - nothing more.
Are my Copilot chats private?
When you interact with Copilot Chat, your data is handled securely and with privacy in mind. All prompts and responses remain within Microsoft's secure cloud, specifically within the York St John Microsoft 365 environment.
Importantly, your interactions with Copilot are not used to train the AI model. Your chats are private and only visible to you. They are not accessible to other users or administrators unless you choose to share them. Access to any data is always governed by your Microsoft 365 identity and the permissions associated with it.
Other AI chatbots are available, but are not provided or supported by York St John University. You must investigate other chatbots carefully before using them so you understand how they work, how they use your data, and their strengths and limitations.
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 sophisticated and complex output.
Gemini, previously known as Bard, is Google's AI chatbot and can be integrated with other Google apps. Free version available with limitations.
Grok is xAI's AI chatbot which is integrated into X (formerly Twitter). Grok is under specific scrutiny in academic research and in public news reports for concerns about its role in misinformation.
Claude is an artificial intelligence, trained by Anthropic using Constitutional AI and claims to be safe, accurate, and secure. It has limited functionality on a free account and increasing levels of functionality at different subscription prices.
MyAI is Snapchat's generative AI chatbot, built to bring AI chat into the Snapchat experience. Snapchat's AI support information is less developed than other AI tools so evaluating how it works is more challenging.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and xAI's Grok are all multipurpose AI chatbots with text generation capabilities.
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.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and xAI's Grok can all help with planning but are not specific tools designed for those tasks, which means you need to give them more specific instructions than specific tools.
There are many AI tools available which are designed to aid research and discovery of resources. These may have better results than just asking a question of a generic text generator tool than ChatGPT - however, we still found limitations in most of the tools tested, so would not recommend using them alone. We also found that summaries produced by these tools could be inaccurate, so would always recommend following up on the original references. Ensure you search multiple tools to find a wider range of resources, and remember to critically evaluate any resources before you use them, regardless of which search tool you used to find them.
Free tools or those with a free version
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 - however, we would not recommend using it alone as it only searches a limited range of resources.
ScholarAI is a tool that focuses specifically on finding research papers and analysing and synthesising their findings. We found it surfaced a good range of academic papers, however the number of free credits is quite limited.
Ai2 Scholar QA is another tool that focuses on paper searching and synthesis. It is non-profit and free to use, however we found it relied on Semantic Scholar as a basis for searching so might miss references only available elsewhere.
Elicit is a tool which searches for papers, screens them for relevance and synthesises findings into a report with references. It provides a detailed breakdown of where it found information and why it selected particular papers which is helpful for checking the accuracy of its process. However it uses Semantic Scholar as a basis for searching so may miss references only available elsewhere.
Consensus is a tool that will search for academic references on your project title and provide short summaries of their findings. It may be useful as a starting point for research, however it uses Semantic Scholar as a basis for searching so may miss references only available elsewhere. This tool is not built with your subject discipline in mind, so you need to use your own judgement to decide if research it finds is relevant and appropriate for your subject discipline.
Perplexity is a tool that can provide detailed answers to questions on a particular topic, providing references. However, most references tend to be news sites or general websites rather than academic sources so it is less suitable for academic research.
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 (a reference management tool) and provides a visualisation of research in the area. It is particularly useful if you are conducting a literature review.
Scite has a limited number of free prompts. It provides a summary of articles on your topic and includes links to the papers so you can follow up on the references. However, you need to sign up for a free trial in order to read the full summary for your query, limiting the usefulness of the free version.
Tools included within York St John University academic literature subscriptions
Proquest One Literature has a Research Assistant which provides a short summary of articles and suggests other related sources. There are also options to delve further into findings or mindmapping related research topics. We found the suggested article feature useful but the summaries were not always that helpful or accurate.
JSTOR has an AI-powered Research Tool which is available to anyone who signs up for an individual account. It provides you with a summary of how your search relates to the articles found, referring to specific pages. You can use it to ask further questions about the articles, show related articles or recommend other searches you could try. We found many of the features useful but answers it gave were sometimes inaccurate.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude and xAI's Grok can all help with research but are not specific tools designed for those tasks, which means you need to give them more specific instructions than specific tools. Different versions of each of these tools use different AI models, have varying levels of access to academic sources, and produce different levels of fake information and sources, so should be used with criticality to check their reliability.
Humata, ChatPDF, Scholarcy, and Notebook LM are AI tools where you can upload a research paper and get a summary of the content. A virtual chatbot (acting as a research assistant) will then answer your questions, citing examples from the paper. All are free at the first point of use but are limited to a small number of PDFs unless you have a paid subscription. These tools are quick and broadly accurate, but summaries are often generic and can sometimes give inaccurate information. It is therefore important to develop your own reading and summarising skills, either separately from or alongside these tools.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and xAI's Grok can all help with reading and summarising but are not specific tools designed for those tasks, which means you need to give them more specific instructions than specific tools.
You might use AI tools to:
- Summarise yourself and then use the AI to check your understanding.
- Use the AI to outline the content of the paper, so that you can target your reading more specifically.
- Ask the AI to explain key terms or concepts that you don't fully understand.
- Pull out specific sections (for example, methodology or recommendations) that are relevant to your writing.
- Ask the AI to reword or explain arguments that you are struggling to follow.
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.
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that includes basic features like spellcheck and grammar checking, and more advanced features including tone and style checking, and re-writing. Grammar tools rely on you to set them up with the correct language you need to write in, so ensure you choose appropriately (such as UK or British English when writing assignments or pieces of work for a UK context and audience).
Adobe Express is part of the York St John Creative Cloud License which means York St John students and staff can access and use it. Generative AI images can be created with Firefly. Adobe suggested that is ethical AI because images are generated from expired or Adobe stock photographs. Adobe Firefly is not trained on customer content.
Canva has Magic Studio (third party tool which is not supported by York St John) which enables you to generate images and videos using a free trial with a chance to upgrade for more features.
Adobe Photoshop also utilises ethical AI in Firefly to add, remove and replace content from your own images using text prompts. A free version is available. Currently only specific staff and some students have access to Adobe Photoshop, depending on subject requirement.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and xAI's Grok can all help with design and image creation, but are not always specific tools designed for those tasks, which means you need to give them more specific instructions than specific tools. Image creation is also often a premium feature in these tools, which may cost money to use. It may not be transparent to you what image and creative works these have been trained on.
Symbolab is a free AI maths calculator. You can enter complex problems using their maths keyboard and get answers that include the method used. Currently, there is no login required.
GeoGebra is a free collection of AI calculators, including graphing and 3D graphing calculators. There are also interactive geometry tools and calculus tools. Currently, there is no login required.
Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and xAI's Grok can all help with maths but are not always specific tools designed for those tasks, which means you need to give them more specific instructions than specific tools.
There are a variety of translation apps on the market and recent developments have meant that they can now process large volumes of data and, as they are not reliant on translation memories and terminology databases, they can now understand nuances and intent more effectively.
However, it still requires a human to intervene when subtle, context-sensitive choices are involved, and post editing strategies are vital (for example, punctuation, terminology correction, checking for nuance).
They are especially useful for translating short communications and high volume, repetitive material, but as they are not actually reading anything, merely processing text, (Hofstadter, 2018), they are not able to understand the 'roles that context, connotation, denotation, register, and culture play in language production and comprehension' (Ducar and Schocket, 2018). It is also important that high stakes information and regulatory compliance and confidentiality are managed effectively. They can also help reduce the anxiety of speaking to real people but much will depend on the skill of the person using the app.
The first feature to look for is general accuracy and quality. It is also important to think about which situation you are going to be using them in, as some are better at business jargon or complex expressions for example. Some languages, such as Chinese or Arabic, are particularly difficult to translate correctly and therefore it is vital to know which apps are more successful in specific language pairs.
It is also important to consider voice recognition and audio output as some apps struggle with regional accents or slang. Some apps also offer camera or photo translation which can be particularly helpful for non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Additional features such as saving previous translations or integration with other platforms may also be useful to consider.
Chat GPT
ChatGPt has been found to regularly out-perform Google translate, managing to convey colloquialisms and avoiding some of the literal translations that other apps offer. However, it may be less efficient with complex sentence structures, is prone to hallucinations and can struggle with full length texts.
Google Translate
This is one of the most widely used and popular translation apps. It can translate more than 200 languages and is easy to use and free. It can also translate over 55 languages without internet connection. It is capable of real time transcription and also allows drawing text on the phone screen. However, it lacks cultural nuance and may misinterpret some idioms.
Apple Translate
A very effective and robust free translation app, and although its interface will seamlessly integrate with other Apple products, it only supports 20 languages (on non-android devices). Languages also come with their own keyboards so you do not need to download or manually switch between them.
Microsoft Translator
Supports over 100 languages for free. It also has a multi-conversation device for over 100 people making it particularly useful for classroom and business settings.
Itranslate
This app offers extra features (for example, verb conjugations, dialect options, built in dictionary/thesaurus) and supports over 100 languages but after a week's free trial it must be paid for by subscription.
DeepL Translator
This app is well known for high quality translations, especially for European languages. It supports over 30 languages and has the functionality to translate entire PDF or Word documents as well as a camera and voice translation. Its free version has a monthly limit on characters and text length. The paid for version, DeepL Pro, offers more advanced features and no character limit.
Papago
Focuses on a small set of languages and is best for East Asian languages (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese). Is free, and easy to use with features such as website translation, handwriting translation and real time voice translation, however, it can struggle with non-Asian languages.
SayHi Translate
Arguably the best app for speech translation, supporting over 90 languages including regional dialects. It has an easy-to-use interface and does not store conversations but does not offer advanced capabilities for professional use.
Lingvanex Translator
This is highly rated by students and offers features such as working with files and multiple input methods, which makes it particularly good for students. It translates over 100 languages and has comprehensive language support. However, subscription is required for premium features and its interface can look overwhelming.
Critical thinking questions
- Can you evaluate the pros and cons of using multi-purpose AI tools versus AI tools for specific purposes?
- If you use these tools, how will it impact your own development of these skills and competencies? Will it help you to learn to write, to plan, to summarise? Will it prevent you from developing those skills?
- If you use these tools, how competent do the tools seem to be for the tasks you have used them for? Why might they be or not be competent?
- Are you better at these skills and tasks than AI seems to be?
- If you become reliant on these tools, are you confident enough in your skills to complete tasks without AI? Will you succeed if you have an assignment, work in a job/industry, are employed by a company, or live in a country where AI is restricted, limited, or banned? Or if AI becomes too expensive?
- How can you be transparent about your AI use? Is there a place in your assignment (such as a cover sheet), or in what you have produced at work, to state what and how AI has supported you? Can you find out how to reference AI tools?
Questions for those who teach, support and/or assess learning
- What competencies are you assessing in your assignments?
- Can you identify and test relevant AI tools to understand the positive/negative impacts that an available AI might have on assessing that competency?
- Based on the competencies you are assessing, and AI's efficacy for those competencies, how can you write more specific and purposeful AI guidance in your assignment brief?
- How can you keep up to date with AI tools and their usage in your discipline/industry/sector and how might this influence your thinking on authenticity in assessment?
Summary
In Part 1 we have focused on What is Generative AI and Where is Generative AI, including how to identify if you are using it. We have also started to consider different kinds of tools and how to make decisions on which tools are better suited to certain tasks. We have also started to consider your own skills and where these have value in deciding whether an AI tool is an appropriate choice.
Being able to understand and describe what AI is and how it works, and where it is and what it is (or is not) doing, is a vital study, employability, and life skill that our changing world needs you to have.
