Guides: Preus Library's AI Literacy Guide: Using AI

When is it "safe" to use AI?

If you interact with Generative AI, be sure to use it with caution and thoughtfulness. Careless use of GenAI puts you at risk of errors, plagiarism, faulty reasoning, bias, stunted skill-building, revealing private information, and more. You may be able to use GenAI as a tool to assist you, but don't let it replace your work or undermine your own knowledge and perspective.

Important note for students: do you understand your professor's policies about the use of AI for class? Check your syllabus.

When is it "safe" to use GenAI for a task? flowchart by Emily Mineart. Adapted from "Is it safe to use ChatGPT for your task?"
by Aleksandr Tiulkanov. / CC BY 4.0.

How to Use AI Responsibly

Suggestions

Cautions

Use AI tools to:

	Orient you to a topic, provide background, and explain complex concepts
	Brainstorm multiple approaches to consider in studying a subject
	Analyze large datasets and draw conclusions
	Perform repetitive numerical tasks
	Create simulations, prototypes and scenarios
	Critique your approach to a topic

Guard against overreliance on AI; challenge yourself to learn and exercise your mental muscles
Verify everything: AI output can sound confident, but these tools can make up (“hallucinate”) or misrepresent information, draw false conclusions, make major mistakes and generate fake sources
Challenge AI responses and require the AI to justify its output by citing sources and data; double-check outside of the AI tool that the sources it cites are real
AI doesn’t “understand” the way humans do; these models lack real-world experience and context, so they don’t easily handle irony, humor and complex metaphors
Beware of biased AI output
Don’t just read AI-generated summaries; take time to read original articles and understand detailed points and context
Be aware that many of today’s AI tools are trained on information up to a certain date and may not have access to recent events or new discoveries
Current generative AI platforms are not good mathematical tools and may return errors and struggle with simple calculations, solving word problems or completing multi-step math equations
Use AI to generate code only where the correctness of the solution can be independently verified with other specialized tools
Ask for help from professors and librarians