Ask Us

Maybe. It depends on the expectations of your professor.  Many professors will now include a statement in their syllabus about whether Artificial Intelligence can be used in assignments, and if yes, in what capacity.  If you're doing an assignment and would like to use AI but are unsure about your professor's expectations, ask them. For many professors the use of AI tools like ChatGPT would be an academic integrity violation.

If you're allowed and using AI for research, keep in mind the following things:

• Every AI system is different and has been trained on a different variety of information. While AI might work for very basic research questions, it may not do well on upper-level research needs, especially if it hasn't had access to scholarly articles or other publications.  Most of these are behind paywalls, so it's unclear if they have been fed to different platforms.  
• If you ask an AI to cite sources, it will often just make them up.  Even if it provides good-looking citations, you might discover those sources don't exist.  If you receive any citation from an AI, look up that source for yourself to make sure it exists and is accurate to the information AI said it conveyed.
• AI image resources like Dall-E 2 may produce images that violate copyright.  While you can use these images for educational projects that will have limited viewership (your professor or classmates), if your project will be made widely available to the general public, you won't be able to verify the copyrights of the images used by the AI.
• If you use AI as a resource or tool in a paper or project, you need to cite it.  Every citation style is trying to catch up with AI to provide guidance on citing.  Below are links to the guidance for the three most common styles.