Remember, you'll always need to verify the information because ChatGPT and other AI tools will sometimes make things up (known as "hallucination.")
How can I use ChatGPT and other large language models for research and writing?
- Brainstorming ideas
- Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
See Generate Topics for a Paper.
- Explaining information in ways that are easy to understand
- Summarizing and outlining
- Asking questions (be sure to fact-check the results) You can ask a million questions without fear of being judged.
- Translating text to different languages (not completely fluent in every language)
- Helping write or debug computing code
For what tasks should I not use ChatGPT and other large language models?
- Library research (not yet). Using NAU's OneSearch, the NAU library databases, or Google Scholar is best for now. This may change in the future with more specialized search tools based on LLMs.
- Asking for any information that would have dire consequences if it was incorrect (such as health, financial, legal advice, and so on). This is because of AI's tendency sometimes to make up answers, but still sound very confident.
Attribution: The information above, with some language and link modifications, was provided by the University of Arizona Libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
