Searching for, reading, and synthesising information to inform your academic work can take time and requires the development of your academic skills. It may be tempting to think that tools such as ChatGPT, Bing, Bard and Perplexity AI speed up this process by finding information for you on a topic and answering your questions directly. However, it is important to know a little more about how these tools work, the information they provide, and to think critically about whether the information they create is appropriate for your intended use.
Search engines versus Generative AI
Search engines
Traditional search engines and literature searching tools such as Google, Library Search or your subject databases, work by searching for information based on the keywords you enter. The search tools match your keywords to the words used to describe content and give you a list of potential sources, such as websites, books, articles or news items, to investigate.
For this to work effectively, you need to break down your topic into a search terms, thinking about alternative terminology, how to combine your keywords, and what you want to include or exclude. It is not always an easy process; it can take time to refine your approach to searching and to identify the best resources to search within.
Generative AI
On the surface it may appear that what generative AI tools do is not just a search for information, they also find and present information for you. You enter your prompt or question, and the response is a unique answer. A source of information has been generated for your purpose alone. You do not need to follow links to online materials or seek out print sources because AI has presented you with the answer and the information is right there in the response.
In terms of information seeking behaviour, this is probably what the majority of us want. Don’t tell me where to find the answer, give me the answer!
However, it is important to recognise that generative AI does not create information in the way you might expect and are familiar with. The way that information is generated has a big impact on the reliability and authority of the response, and how you might use it during your studies.
How is Generative AI creating information?
Generative AI text tools such as ChatGPT and Bard are computer programs trained on a large language model. That means these programmes have been trained by consuming large amounts of text from books, articles, and websites, which the programme then analyses to find patterns and relationships between words and longer bits of text. This intelligence is based on a recognition of patterns rather than an interpretation of meaning or what the words actually say.
