If you choose to use GenAI in your academic work, you should be aware of its limitations.
Inaccuracy
- Information from GenAI may appear convincing, but GenAI does not understand the content it generates, which can lead to hallucinations or factual errors.
- GenAI generates responses based on data on which it has been trained. If you are interested in a very specialised topic, or something very new, the GenAI will have fewer sources on which to draw so the depth of its response may be limited.
- GenAI cannot apply critical thinking, so may present misinterpreted information.
Bias
- GenAI generates responses based on data on which it has been trained, which includes webpages, social media conversations and other online content which may be biased, offensive or outdated.
Copyright and intellectual property
- Any information you put into freely available Generative AI tools as prompts becomes available to everybody, so you have to be careful not to put in personal or confidential information or protected intellectual property. If using a general GPT tool, you are advised to use Microsoft CoPilot through UCL, which does not save your prompts and is much more secure.
- If using information from GenAI, there is no way of knowing if the material you are using has infringed copyright and there is uncertainty over who owns the intellectual property of AI outputs.
Responsible and ethical use
- Utilising GenAI for a task instead of carrying it out independently may be detrimental to your learning.
- There are environmental and human rights implications with using GenAI.
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