Generative AI

Is using AI for assignments considered cheating? 

That depends on how you use it, but there are appropriate ways to use AI that can help you save time and study more effectively.

When and how you may use AI for a course is at the discretion of your instructor, and some instructors do allow for certain uses of AI. Check for an AI-use policy in your course syllabus. If your instructor doesn't have a written AI-use policy, you should always consult them before using AI for an assignment.

When talking with your instructor, come prepared with a plan for how, specifically, you plan to use AI for your assignment and how you will provide attribution. MLA, APA, and Chicago Style have guidelines for citing AI-generated content. Your instructor may also request that you provide the full transcript of your interaction with the AI tool.

Regardless of your instructor's AI-use policy, presenting AI-generated work as your own is always a violation of ELAC's Policy on Academic Honesty and can have serious consequences, including (but not limited to) failing the assignment. 

How can generative AI help students research, write, and study more efficiently?

Generative AI is not the right tool for every situation, but there are several ways it can be helpful to students. Some tasks generative AI can help with include:

• Summarizing and clarifying complex written information 
  AI tools are great at breaking down complicated ideas into simpler concepts, translating dense readings into easy to understand language, and summarizing long articles to help you quickly identify the sources that will be most useful for your research. 
• Brainstorming topic ideas, keywords, and research questions  
  AI excels at generating creative ideas for research topics, recommending keywords you can use to research your chosen topic, suggesting ways to narrow the scope of research questions, and recommending ideas for strengthening your thesis.
• Revising and editing student writing 
  AI is able to identify and correct grammatical and spelling errors and provide suggestions to help improve the clarity of your writing. Before writing, try telling an AI tool the main points you want to make in your essay and asking it to generate an outline to help you organize your ideas!
• Generating study guides and questions to help you practice course content and prepare for exams
  AI tools can generate practice questions to quiz you on material for upcoming exams, help you identify key concepts and terminology from your classes, and recommend other ways for you to practice and study course content.
• Creating study schedules and time management plans
  AI can help you break down big research projects into smaller goalposts and then generate a personalized study schedule to help you manage your time efficiently.
• Practicing having conversations in a non-native language
  AI chatbots can improve language skills by simulating realistic conversations and providing instant feedback on spelling and grammar.
• Adapting text into audio files
  AI can convert written content into audio, making information more accessible for students with disabilities, auditory learners, and busy students studying on the go. It can read the original text aloud or even adapt articles into a podcast-style conversational format to make the content more interesting and approachable.
• Providing alternate perspectives
  Generative AI can explain topics from a variety of viewpoints to help you better understand common arguments and counterarguments related to your research topic.
• Debugging code
  AI can quickly identify and recommend fixes for errors in code.

On the other hand, some tasks that generative AI is not yet reliable for include:

• Generating factual answers
  AI is not capable of identifying misinformation, disinformation, or bias and is prone to "hallucinating" information that isn't true to fill in the gaps in its knowledge base. Remember to fact-check any responses you get from AI if you need an accurate or unbiased answer! 
• Finding credible sources
  Although generative AI tools may be able to help with your research in some ways, they don't yet have the ability to discern between credible sources and misinformation, so they can't be wholly relied upon as a research tool. Although some generative AI tools are web search enabled, because they aren't able to reliably identify credible sources and they can't access information that's kept behind paywalls (which includes most scholarly research), they aren't a good substitute for developing strong research skills. AI tools that aren't web search enabled are even less helpful; they can't access the most recent information or show you where their data came from, and the citations they generate are often for sources that don't actually exist. On the other hand, some AI models can be helpful for recommending search terms to try in the library's databases, and they may even be able to recommend specific sources that you can access through the databases.

How are students using AI to augment their education? 

The videos below share perspectives from real students who have used AI for their college courses. Check out these videos to find out what has and hasn't worked for them!