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AI Literacy

What Generative AI is good for. What it is not good for.

Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because ChatGPT will sometimes make things ups (known as "hallucination.")

What is it good for?

  • Brainstorming ideas
  • Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases.
    See Generate Topics for Your Research Paper with ChatGPT.
  • 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

What is it not so good for?

Prompting

What is prompting?

Simply, it's what you type into the chat box.


The way you prompt makes a huge difference in the output that GenAI gives you. So it's worth learning some tips.


Always verify the information it gives you.

Think of you Generative AI (GenAI) tool as your personal intern. They need very specific instructions, and they need you to verify the information.

GenAI sometimes makes things up. That's because it's designed to write in a way that sounds like human writing. It's not designed to know facts.

Tips for writing effective prompts for GenAI

  1. Give it some context or a role to play.
  2. Give it very detailed instructions, including how you would like the results formatted.
  3. Keep conversing and asking for changes. Ask it to revise the answer in various ways.

Examples

  1. A role could be, "Act as an expert in [fill in the blank]." 
    Act as an expert community organizer.
    Act as a high school biology teacher.
    Act as a comedian.
     
  2. Example prompt:
    Act as an expert academic librarian. I’m writing a research paper for Sociology and I need help coming up with a topic. I’m interested in topics related to climate change. Please give me a list of 10 topic ideas related to climate change.
     
  3. Example of changes: (keep conversing until you get something useful)
    Now give me some sub-topics or research questions for [one of those topics]. And give me a list of keywords and phrases I can use to search for that topic in library databases and Google Scholar.
     

    Or...

    I didn't like any of those topics. Please give me 10 more.

More Information on Prompts and Prompt Engineering for AI

Canvas Course Module:

Rush University's Center for Teaching Excellence and Innovation has created a Canvas Course module on AI Literacy. A form to request the files can be found here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfbKX9bWK1-4HZcAyPMjbobHAWsalNilm2pXHjoFmv7Dr_KBQ/viewform and our instructional designer colleagues at NAU's Teaching and Learning Center can assist in importing the module into your own Canvas.