4.9: How Can AI Help With Research?
- Page ID
- 244110
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There are a number of ways that you can use Artificial Intelligence tools to assist with research tasks. Again, it's important to know the limitations and issues involved with AI tools. It's also important to always refer to your course syllabus and teacher before choosing to get help from AI. It can often be perfectly fine to use an AI tool to help adjust a few words in a sentence or identify search keywords, but it's almost always inappropriate to copy writing from an AI tool and use it in an assignment (unless specifically instructed to do so).
For example, Grammarly is a commonly used tool that uses AI learning to recommend improvements to your writing. As shown below, it can be used to highlight and recommend that I use a different word than 'rather'.
Changing that word (or even a part of a sentence or several small sections) would be fine in most cases. However, there is a 'Generative AI' mode where you can ask Grammarly to write for you and it will completely rewrite your text. Copying and using that text from Grammarly would be plagiarism (as you did not write it yourself). This writing is predicable and often able to be detected by different teachers (potentially causing disciplinary action or a significant penalty to your grade).
Other AI Tools That Can Be Useful
Goblin.Tools(opens in new window) can be used to create to-do lists. These can help keep you on track with your projects!
- Their Formalizer(opens in new window) can also be used to suggest more professional-sounding versions of your own writing. However, directly copying this text would also be plagiarism. Instead of using it to completely change your writing, you could use it to get ideas for changing some of the words that you used or ways to adjust a few sentences. Instead of copying, use it as a learning tool to improve!
ChatPDF(opens in new window) can be used to help you understand scholarly articles. If you find an article confusing, you can try loading it into ChatPDF where you can ask questions and have the website answer them. First, you have to download an article as a PDF. Then you can upload the article into the ChatPDF website. Once the PDF is loaded, you can type questions into the website and it will generate answers based on the content of the PDF. For example, you could try:
- What are the main points of this article?
- What methodology did the authors use?
- Summarize this article
Bing Chat(opens in new window) can be used to brainstorm ideas or keywords. While it would be unethical to ask Bing Chat to write your paper for you, you can at least use it help you search. If you're struggling to come up with a paper idea, you can ask Bing Chat to recommend essay topics; or even to recommend research topics related to a specific subject you have in mind. You can also ask it for keywords that you might use to search. It will provide you with an assortment of related topics.