Generative AI

Lateral Reading

• Lateral Reading is an essential skill for verifying the credibility of your research. Rather than just relying on the information presented in the sources you found, lateral reading involves going outside of the sources you're evaluating and consulting multiple other sources simultaneously.
• Instead of only reading that article and accepting it as credible, lateral reading encourages you to open new tabs or sources to cross-reference that information presented. You might look up the author's qualifications, expertise, affiliations that might influence the author's perspective and potential biases. Consider the credibility of the publication of website where the information is found. See what other experts or reputable sources, such as academic journals or reliable news sources, have to say about the topic. Ask yourself is the information can be corroborated by other credible sources.
• By using lateral reading techniques, you become a more discerning researcher and better equip yourself to use and evaluate the vast resources available to you.

AI Advantages

• You may want to use AI to generate ideas for selecting a topic and brainstorm keywords to help refine a topic and narrow down the scope of your research,
• AI can help you simplify concepts that are new or complex for easier understanding.
• AI can help faculty personalize instruction by creating lessons and tutorials to address students' areas of weakness and provide targeted feedback.

AI Weakness

• Bias | AI Sources reflect the ideas and writing of the people inputting the data. Currently, there is a lack of diversity in those contributing to AI, with most contributors representing the United States and northern Europe, and with very little representation from marginalized people.
• Inaccuracy | Chatbots, such as ChatGPT, are driven by a LLM, which learns its skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text. By doing this, chatbots learn to predict what the next most common word will be in a sentence of words. This does not always give the most accurate answer to the researcher's question. Hallucination is when the chatbot doesn't know the correct answer, so it writes what it does know. Hallucinations can occur in citations as well. It may create a bogus citation that looks legitimate.
• Currency | Chatbots have a cut-off date which students need to be aware of. They do not have access to more current information after that date.
• Plagiarism | AI has raised concerns over copyright and intellectual property issues especially in art, music, and film industries. Information derived from an AI source is considered an outside source, just like a book or an article, and needs to be cited. 

Citing AI-Generated Content

• When using generative AI for a class assignment or research project, you need to cite it just as you do other sources. When using ChatGPT to help write or structure your paper, even if you do not otherwise quote or paraphrase its contents, you will want to acknowledge use of it. Failure to cite all sources is plagiarism.
• When doing a research paper and using sources that you found in books, journals, and websites, you will be required to create citations for each of your sources. You will need to include citations for sources that are not your original thoughts, words, or ideas. Citing sources enables readers to follow your citation back to the original source for further exploration; it shows your instructor and your readers that you cared enough about the project to research it and seek credible outside sources to include in your paper; and it gives credit to the original creator of the information found in the source. 

Check the citation style below for examples of how to cite artificial intelligence:

MLA

APA

CHICAGO