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AI Literacy

Finding the Right Tool

AI Tools (MIT Sloan) - Browsable list of AI tools; organized into three categories: Writing and Content Creation Tools, Data Analysis and Quantitative Tools, and Image Generation Tools. 

Futurepedia - a free site listing different AI tools and their uses.

Ithaka GenAI Tracker -  a site which lists generative AI products that are either marketed specifically towards postsecondary faculty or students or appear to be actively in use by postsecondary faculty or students for teaching, learning, or research activities.

Which AI Tool for the Task? (UA Libraries) 

Beyond ChatGPT (UA Libraries) 

AI Tools for Research

AI tools can be useful in the research process, such summarizing a body of research, looking for related research, and organizing literature reviews.  Before you start using one of the below apps make sure you check with your professor as to whether or not it is ok for you to do so, and make sure you understand the ethical consideration, such as privacy and copyright, before using.

According to AI expert Ethan Mollick, it takes around 10 hours of use to become proficient with GenAI or other innovative AI apps. Before using with your assignments as an instructor or student, make sure you put in the time to understand these tools

 
Uses
Tool
Cost

Background Research

Perplexity: AI powered search engine that provides concise answers using web-based resources. Use to generate terms, become familiar with new topics, or to ask question about your research.

Free to use; Pro subscription allows unlimited searching, different LLM sources, and data visualizations

Translation

Useful for translating research articles into or out of English.

ChatPDF: upload PDF, limited to 2 PDFs a day at 120 pages each

ChatGPT: copy and paste text, limited to 4,000 tokens

ChatPDFFree for up to 2 PDFs (less than 120 pages); Plus subscription allows unlimited numbers of PDFs

ChatGPTFree uses older LLM data; Pro subscription uses newer LLM, and includes other AI apps

Searching for scholarly articles

Semantic Scholar: use author, title, or DOI for searching, and the app will bring up related research.

Consensus: an academic search database that lets you input research questions, view aggregated research article results with summations of widely accepted studies.

Scite_: Analyzes scientific articles citation patterns to help construct components of a literature review and support critical analysis. 

Semantic Scholar:  Free with Sign Up

Consensus: Free with Sign Up; Premium subscription allows unlimited use of some features

Scite_:  Requires a subscription to use.

Citation tracing for literature reviews

Connected Papers: Creates visual maps of related academic papers.

Research Rabbit: Uses data from Semantic Scholar to explore similar works and authors.

LitMaps: Uses a single relevant paper to locate other articles of interest and generate a visual literature map to explore for your literature review.

Inciteful: Provides related papers to key articles, and illustrates how different papers are related to one another through the literature. Especially helpful for multi-disciplinary research.

Connected Papers:  Free for up to 5 graphs a month; Academic subscription allows unlimited use.

Research Rabbit: Free

LitMapsFree for limited searches and data visualizations; Pro subscription allows for unlimited searches and visualizations

IncitefulFree to use

Brainstorming Concepts/Ideas

ChatGPT: Create prompts for subtopics, organize/outline a paper, and brainstorm open data sources; not suitable for producing citations; all content input into ChatGPT becomes useable by OpenAI

Elicit: AI research assistant that allows you to type in a research question or upload example articles; returns related questions, subject headings, and keywords to make optimize database searching.

ChatGPTFree uses older LLM data; Pro subscription uses newer LLM, and includes other AI apps

Elicit:  Free with sign up, restricts usage beyond pre-set credit allowance; Pro subscription gives you 12,000 credits to use per month, and you can purchase more.

Comprehension of Research

ChatPDF: Ask questions of uploaded documents, guided by AI.

Consensus: Provides study snapshots with population, sample size, methods, and outcomes; the synthesize feature provides a summary of all results and offers consensus graph.

ChatPDFFree for up to 2 pdfs (less than 120 pages); Plus subscription allows unlimited numbers of PDFs

Consensus: Free with Sign Up; Premium subscription allows unlimited use of some features

Chatbots

Claude is an "AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest." Claude is known for having a particularly large memory and can summarize large documents or multiple pdfs. Claude currently cannot search the internet or provide links to its sources.

Gemini is Google's AI. You can install Gemini extensions to assist you with tasks in other Google products (YouTube, Hotels, Flights, Workplace).

Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) has already incorporated its own tool Meta AI into its products.  All searching within these products on cell phone apps will happen with Meta AI operating in the background.

Meta's popular, open source Llama model powers many different tools. The assistant in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp messengers is designed to provide personalized and empathetic responses, understand context and nuances of human conversations, and offer creative solutions and ideas.

Microsoft Copilot is a GenAI app which uses ChatGPT's LLM, with a different software overlayed on top.  Because UGA is a Microsoft 365 campus, we have access to Enterprise Microsoft Co-Pilot, which is a frontier app with Commercial Data Protection.  If your students want to use a more sophisticated GenAI app, but don't want to pay $20 a month to access ChatGPT 4, Co-Pilot is a good alternative.  It also has privacy features built in.  This means that none of the information entered into the chatbot will be saved and used to create other LLMs.  Another benefit of using Copilot over ChatGPT is that Copilot provides links to the sources of information it uses when it generates a response.  This allows to students to immediately be able to fact check for accuracy.

To use the Enterprise (paid) version of Copilot, students will need to sign in with their MyIDs and passwords.

Copilot comes with three different conversation style modes:

  • Creative:  gives longer, more descriptive responses
  • Precise:  focuses on shorter, more search-focused answers
  • Balanced:  middle of the road between creative and precise

ChatGPT is probably the GenAI app with the most name recognition.  Many of the AI apps we use are based on the LLM developed by OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.  There are two different versions of ChatGPT:  a free version (ChatGPT 3.5) and frontier version (ChatGPT 4), which uses more sophisticated software, and a larger, better LLM.  Newer versions of GenAIs tend to have corrected problems that have popped up in the free version.  It is important for students to know the difference in quality and experience between the two different versions.

ChatGPT Guidance for Instructors from CTL

Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine and chatbot that is designed to provide accurate and comprehensive answers to user queries. By searching the web in real-time, it offers up-to-date information on a wide range of topics. It is particularly notable as the only chatbot with an "Academic" Focus setting. 

Getting Started: What you need to know to get started with Perplexity

Prompting Tips and Examples on Perplexity