Guides: AI & Research: Introduction to Using AI

Each course has unique goals and outcomes, including how you use AI. Check with your professor and syllabus for specific information on how to appropriately use AI in your work.

What is Generative AI?

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The capacity of computers or other machines to exhibit or simulate intelligent behavior

Generative AI

Artificial intelligence designed to produce output, esp. text or images, previously thought to require human intelligence, typically by using machine learning to extrapolate from large collections of data

Machine Learning

The capacity of computers to learn and adapt without following explicit instructions

Oxford English Dictionary
Provides the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world. Focuses on the history of individual words and of the English language—traced through 3 million quotations, from classic literature and specialist periodicals to film scripts and cookery books.

Effective Prompts

When using AI tools, the AI-generated content is only as good as your question. If you ask a vague question, you will get less helpful information. It's important to understand how to generate the most helpful responses. Here are some general guidelines:

Continue asking questions and refining your prompt.
Research your subject before asking your question so that you use the right terminology.
Give more context for your prompt (For example, if you want comments on an article that you're writing, include your audience and the tone that you want.)
Ask "Do you need more context to answer my question?"
Start a new conversation when you're switching topics.

Potential Uses of AI

Use	Sample Prompt
Generate & narrow topics	Give me 5 more specific areas of research on the impact of social media on loneliness in young adults.
Review information for a test	Can you ask me 20 increasingly difficult questions on the Peloponnesian War that follow Bloom's Taxonomy of learning from remembering to evaluating and tell me how I can improve each answer?
Feedback on your argument	In my introduction, which sentence would you identify as my thesis?
Find potential causes of bugs in your code	Why would my code return an "IndexError: list index out of range" in Python 3.12?
Personalized grammar feedback	Can you identify where I've used informal language in my research paper?
Link to further research	Use a tool such as ResearchRabbit or Scite.ai to link to ancestor and descendent articles