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AI and the Library: What is AI?

What is AI?

person sitting at desk talking to chatbot on screen

Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is a field of computer science that focuses on developing algorithms and systems that can learn from data, recognise patterns, and make decisions or predictions based on those algorithms or systems.

Examples of AI applications in everyday life include chatbots, image or voice recognition software, autonomous vehicles, and recommendation systems (for films, music or online shopping). 

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What could AI be good for?

AI tools can help students in a number of ways – for instance:

  • Helping to improve your grammar and writing styles.
  • Explaining concepts and clarifying meaning. 
  • Answering questions using material which can be found on the internet.  
  • Drafting ideas and planning your study.
  • Helping structure written materials. 
  • Looking for literature sources.
  • Generating ideas for graphics and visuals. 
  • Reviewing and summarising text.
  • Transcribing spoken word and describing the content of images.
  • Data analysis and visualisation.
  • Large dataset processing.
  • Experiment design.

What is AI not good for?

Overusing AI tools will reduce your opportunities to develop your writing, creative thinking, and research skills. These are key academic and professional skills you will need as you progress through your studies and into work.

If you are going to use these tools for your studies, it is important to do so appropriately and ethically. 

Subject Librarians

Got a question about using AI?

 

Get in touch with your Subject Librarian for help and advice on suitable resources for your studies, evaluating sources and referencing queries

Glossary of Key Terms

  • Academic Integrity: Acting in an honest, ethical, and transparent manner in an academic setting.

  • Accuracy (of outputs): How correct, precise, and relevant is the information generated by the AI tool.

  • Algorithm: A set of rules or procedures followed by a computer to solve a particular problem or perform a task. 

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI): Computer systems designed to perform tasks that usually require human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making. 

  • Bias: Prejudice for or against something, a person, or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair 

  • Comprehensiveness (of literature coverage): How thoroughly is the existing research on a topic being covered.  

  • Collaborative: Working with others towards a common goal.

  • Currency: Relates to the timeliness of the resources or refers to how recent the information is.

  • Generative AI: a type of AI that can make new text, pictures, or data using special models. These models use prompts to learn from examples and then they create similar content from that existing data.  

  • Hallucinations: Refers to erroneous ("fake") AI-generated outputs. 

  • Interrogation (of results): Critically examining and questioning the outcomes or findings in the outputs from an AI tool. 

  • Large Language Model: A model that uses massive amounts of training data to teach algorithms without human instruction. ChatGPT is an example of this.

  • Machine Learning (ML): A subset of AI that involves systems learning from data and improving their performance over time without explicit programming. 

  • Output: Any content generated by AI.

  • Prompt: A specific input or instruction given to a generative model to generate output. 

  • Synthesise: Combining different ideas or information from a number of sources into a coherent whole.

  • Training Data: Training data refers to the set of examples or information used to teach a machine learning model how to perform a specific task.