Artificial Intelligence and Academic Research: Risks With AI in Academic Writing

Artificial Intelligence can be used to assist with academic research, but caution needs to be exercised when interacting with generative AI. This page will cover some of the concerns around the use of AI in your school work.

Artificial Intelligence is currently under fire for using copyrighted materials and our data without permission. In the digital age, many licenses are taken with our data. OpenAI is currently being sued for using our data and copyrighted material to "teach" ChatGPT. Although a decision has not been made in this case, it is important to be aware of as we navigate this tool. 

• Read "OpenAI Sued for Using Everybody's Writing to Train AI" by The Byte for more in-depth information. Here is a snippet of the article: 
  • "To train its powerful AI language models, OpenAI utilized an incredible amount of data scraped from various corners of the web. Although OpenAI doesn't even know exactly what its systems are trained on, those datasets include everything from Wikipedia articles and famous novels to social media posts and incredibly niche erotica — and OpenAI didn't ask permission for any of it."

• Generative AI tools have been known to generate sources that do not exist. Before including a source created from these tools, do your own research to check if this source exists. 
  • An easy way to do this is by using a strategy called "Lateral Reading." This is essentially opening another tab to check the validity of a source by doing an investigative search. To see an example, see below!