RD 115 Evans: Activities

it is imperative to understand that text or images are not context free (even AI-generated ones), especially within the frame of information literacy, that is: how sources are created; how sources are valued; how research works. 

Generative AI results have been derived from sources, online conversations, and predictive text training.

It is one thing (and very convenient) to ask about something you can easily judge for credibility and usefulness on your own (for example, the top ten women's basketball teams; suggestions for a list of the most important writers on a topic; the best kind of washing machines and price comparisons for the local area). 

It will be risky to rely on AI generated results for something you don't know about. And much more risky to use AI to complete an assignment for you, where you short-circuit your own learning process. 

Generative AI tools provide essentially summaries of information, usually without providing context, or acknowledgement of where the information came from.

The activities on this page can help you learn about the possible consequences of using generative artificial intelligence tools, to learn how they work. 

Some AI tools are now connecting to Google search, but identifying sources from the realm of the information ecosystem remains problematic.  Finding sources such as these can be difficult with AI requests:

• research studies
• primary sources
• broadcast news outlets
• government documents
• articles that have been edited and published by recognized or academic publishers

AI doesn't fact-check or triangulate, but relies instead on the frequency of terms.

It will find answers for what you ask, whether the question is based in reality or not.  If you ask for experts, it may reflect bias from what it LLM has been trained with.  It would be better to ask for what the conversations by experts that are that are currently taking place around a topic and then finding and evaluating what they have published.