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Artificial Intelligence in Academics

This guide is created for the FSCJ community, with resources and information about Artificial Intelligence that can help students, faculty, and the greater community.

ChatGPT

 

ChatGPT responds to your prompts not like Google does--by finding you content and information--but rather by generating, or creating, new content. It's an amazing new tool that is revolutionizing human knowledge.

For more information about ChatGPT, see ChatGPT, a beginner's guide, from G-Shift labs.

Below is info about ChatGPT that will help you use it safely and effectively.

Privacy and Terms of Use

Understanding the terms of use of software like ChatGPT is important because they disclose what information of yours is collected, why they collected that information, how that information will be used, and what measures (if any) they take to protect your private information. Here's a summary of ChatGPT's terms of use:

  • OpenAI's privacy policy allows them to share your data with third-party vendors, law enforcement, and other users.
  • What is put into this software is not private. 
  • Their Terms of Use state "you must be 18 years or older and able to form a binding contract with OpenAI to use the Services".
  • Their Terms state that users must not "represent that output from the Services was human-generated when it is not". 
  • What information gained from ChatGPT and OpenAI must be shared as from ChatGPT and OpenAI, meaning if it is used it a paper, it must be stated as from their services and not human generated. 
  • Users are responsible for the content generated, "ensuring it does not violate any applicable laws or these Terms."
  • While you can delete your ChatGPT account and no longer use it, your prompts and questions belong to OpenAI and become a part of the company’s collected data.

Browser Extensions

As you become more proficient with ChatGPT, these common browser extensions may prove useful. 

Other AI Tools

These AI tools, though less famous than ChatGPT, are similar and may be worth exploring. Please note that some may involve fees. 

  • Bard – A Google product, Bard can be used to explore creative ideas & explain things simply. It’s a Google AI experiment that can generate text, translate languages, and write different kinds of creative content.
  • Jasper – A commercial product, Jasper is designed for writing ad copy, blogs, and other content. Although primarily aimed at sales and marketing, it also has the capability of “improving” a piece of writing, can create or improve long form text (it advertises writing of books), operates in multiple languages, and does plagiarism and grammar checks.  It is one of the more frequently reviewed products in this space. It is fee based. 
  • Writesonic – “Writesonic’s GPT-3 language model deploys powerful AI to generate blog posts, landing pages, adverts, product descriptions, and emails, so it’s a top choice if you need a versatile writing tool” (TechRadar, 2022). It works in multiple languages and  advertises a ChatSonic version (“like Chat GPT, but with superpowers”). Fee based.
  • Article Forge – This tool advertises that it “writes entire 1,500+ word articles automatically” in about 60 seconds. Many of the others will write long format also, but this tool seems to be particularly designed for this. It also does plagiarism checking. Fee based. 
  • WordAI – This company advertises that their tool is best at improving existing content.  This tool is a favorite (according to techradar) of people in tech.  It is more of a rewriting tool than a content creation tool. “This tool can totally restructure your sentences and paragraphs to make them easier and more pleasing to read, and WordAI will automatically add keywords, make your writing more varied and fix spelling and grammar mistakes. It can use AI to improve clarity, and it’ll avoid duplicated content and create up to 1,000 rewrites per article” (TechRadar, 2022). Fee  based.
  • AI Writer – Like many of these tools, AI Writer is geared toward the production of web content and search engine optimization (SEO).  It is largely designed for sales and marketing. Unlike many of the other tools, AI Writer provides a list of sources and citations. Also does text rewording, although partly this is for SEO optimization, not just readability. Fee based.
  • Ink – A relatively new product built on GPT-3, it is designed for expanding text you have written, rewriting/editing text, and generating text.  Like some other tools, it will give you multiple variations to choose from for each prompt.  It also includes grammar support and a readability score, so if you do your own writing/editing it shows you how the readability changes. Fee based. 
  • Moonbeam – This tool has been mentioned in recent Inside Higher Ed articles on AI, probably because of Moonbeam's pricing and because it is trained to write essays, which makes it attractive for students. Free version as well as fee based.

Thank you to the University of Toronto Artificial Intelligence in Teaching & Learning curated bibliography for this information and descriptions.