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Generative AI tools can make your work easier, more productive, and more creative. However, it's important to always use these tools with critical thinking skills. Here's a list of things to keep in mind, adapted from an NPR article from June 2023. More details are below as well.
Privacy: Be careful about sharing any personal or sensitive information with AI tools. Especially if the tool is free, the platform may use that information to train its AI models. Are you comfortable with this potential breach of privacy? If not, you should consider using a platform that makes a commitment not to use your data (perhaps through your institution), or be cautious about what information you submit.
Purpose: Before you get started, consider what you're using this platform to create. Are you using the tool to complete an assignment? What do you think your professor wanted you to learn? Does your use of AI make it less likely that you will learn these new skills? Always make sure your use of AI doesn't violate the rules that your professor put into place before using it for a class assignment.
Consent: Especially for images, it's important to consider any people that you are depicting and whether your image creation could harm that person.
Disclosure: IWhether you're sharing your AI-generated content on social media or in an assignment, it's important to be clear to your end reader/viewer that what they're seeing is AI-generated. This transparency is important for the immediate viewer, and for any subsequent viewers who might see the text, image, or video and come to a misinformed conclusion.
Fact check: Generative AI is very good at sounding correct, but it is in no way designed to be accurate in its claims (see the tab "What is Generative AI" for information about "hallucinations."). It's very important to fact-check any claims that AI makes before relying on them.
It can be very confusing for students to determine if their use of AI is plagiarism or not. It can help to ask yourself these two questions:
See below for guidance about how to cite the outputs of AI.
Human biases that exist in the training data for Large Language Models (LLMs) can influence the outputs these tools give. These distorted results can harm historically marginalized groups, as other technologies have done for decades.
Training and running generative AI systems require enormous amounts of energy and water, which contributes to greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change. In addition, AI applications can and have been used to accelerate the extraction of fossil fuels and increase other unsustainable activities (like the marketing of wasteful fast fashion).
Right now, the outputs of Generative AI tools are considered to be in the public domain, because they are not created by a human. However, there is significant litigation going to further explore this issue, and the results of these trials could significantly change what Generative AI tools are able to do. In addition, the US Copyright Office is launching an investigation into copyright and Generative AI.