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Generative AI guidance

Guidance about the use of Generative AI for students at Newman.

Using Generative AI as a research tool

If you do choose to use a Generative AI tool, such as ChatGPT, to help you with your research and understanding of your university work, we suggest that you use it only to gather basic and background information about a topic you are learning about or interested in using in your academic assignments or individual research.

The Librarians at Birmingham Newman Library have had variable success in asking AI Chatbots to summarise a topic area and recommend some further reading. In this respect, the tools can provide information on the same kind of footing as Wikipedia and other general web-based reference sources. You should therefore treat the information given to you by AI tools in the same way: it is not original, detailed or authoritative enough to be cited in your academic work, but you can use the information to investigate the further reading it recommends. You could also potentially ask it to recommend key words and phrases that you can then use to look for more scholarly and appropriate information sources in Library Search or databases.

You should always keep in mind that, currently, this technology is in an early stage of development and it cannot be relied upon to give you good quality, or very often even true, information.

References

ChatGPT (2023) Attainment gap: factors and solutions [Prompt provided by Birmingham Newman University Librarians]. 13 December. Available at: https://chat.openai.com/share/7209a1e5-e2d7-4f67-98f0-299c13409b2b (Accessed 13 December 2023).

ChatGPT (2023) White working class attainment [Prompt provided by Birmingham Newman University Librarians]. 13 December. Available at: https://chat.openai.com/share/bb3855e9-c157-4e6e-8e04-626f3b9b70f1 (Accessed 13 December 2023).

Last reviewed: 13 December 2023

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