AI: Tips & Tools from Your Librarians: What is AI?

Getting Started

Here you will find an overview of AI and Generative AI plus some helpful links written for a general audience.  No matter your level, these are great places to start!

     Do you have questions or need help?  Check out the rest of this guide and reach out to our AI Support Group - a group of library faculty from multiple disciplines to offer you support as you navigate everything AI!

About AI

AI has been all over the news for quite a while now for doing everything from find that perfect chili recipe to writing a cover letter for your job application. Here you will find some starting points on what AI and more specifically generative AI are, and guidelines and resources to think about how you might use AI (or already be using) in your life.
Most major news sources have some good overviews on these topics. Here are some helpful ones written for anyone:
Some companies even use crowd sourcing to develop their neural engines for AI these days.  If you are curious, one to try is Google's Quick Draw!

Using AI

Remember that AI is a Tool, not a One-Size Fits All Solution...
Like using calculators, AI is a tool, not something that can do everything that a human can.  GenAI can be a way to do things more efficiently and help you with your research and other work.
You may have heard the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" with respect to computers and programming before...  In the context of GenAI, like any tool, it is designed to do some things, but not others, so if you give it something it is not designed to do, you might get something strange out.  It is up to the user to check their work just like relying on spelling and grammar checking in Word or an app like Mint to organize your finances.

Generative AI

(from https://marketoonist.com/2023/06/impact-of-chatgpt.html)

As the above cartoon highlights, there is much unknown about generative AI, but people are scrambling to use it for any application!  ChatGPT might be one of the most famous (or infamous) generative AI out there right now, but there are many others that use this type of technology (just to list a few):
  • Google Bard
  • Microsoft Bing
  • DALL-E
  • Midjourney
  • Chatsonic
  • Jasper Chat
  • Copy.ai
  • ChatFlash - Neuroflash AI
  • GrowthBar
  • and more...
ChatGPT is just one of many in this type of technology, which is categorized like this:
     Generative AI (GenAI) -> Foundation Models -> Large Language Models (LLM) -> ChatGPT
Basically you have GenAI that is a AI technique to allow for learning from inputs and generate new of that same type of input.  Then this is applied for a specific large, broad set of data (foundation models), which is specifically text (LLM).  Last, this is applied with a conversational chatbot to create content getting to the user level of ChatGPT.
For more information, also check out the history of generative AI (and AI) here if you are curious: https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2023/05/foundation-models/