What are appropriate ways to use GenAI in my research?
Answer
If you use GenAI for research, use it critically and with caution. Read our tips below.
Background Research
Similar to Wikipedia, GenAI can be a starting place for background research or understanding a concept. However, you must fact-check what you learn from it because it is not a scholarly or reliable resource. The information it provides may be biased, inaccurate, vague, or outdated. Find a reliable resource to verify the information’s validity.
Summarizing Articles
Some people like to use GenAI to summarize long texts such as scholarly articles, and there are several apps that support this. However, be aware that:
- By inputting a text into GenAI, you may be violating copyright laws. If you would like to use GenAI for this purpose, ensure that the LLM is not trained on users’ prompts. For example, you can turn off chat history and model training on ChatGPT.
- The summary could be an oversimplification of the article, or it could be inaccurate. Use the summary as a starting place to understand the main idea, then read the article yourself. A tip for reading is to focus on the abstract, introduction, and conclusion/discussion to understand the main idea and main points.
Also see: “Should I use AI-driven apps like Research Rabbit for research?”