AI: Student Guide to ChatGPT, CoPilot and Other AI Resources
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- Creating Prompts
- Fact-checking is always needed
- AI & Databases
- Is using ChatGPT considered cheating?
- Ethical Considerations
- Citing Generative AI
- Tools by Category
- Different Disciplines
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FAQs
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- How can I protect my privacy while using ChatGPT?
- I can't find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
- How are generative AI models biased, and how can I avoid biased results?
- How can I fact-check the information that ChatGPT and other AI resources give me?
- Which AI tools are the best for searching?
AI-U Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence
AI_U Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence
This is the second publication of the Student Guide to AI series produced by Elon University and the American Association of Colleges & Universities (AAC&U)
Credit
This guide was adapted with permission from the University of Arizona Libraries, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Using ChatGPT and other AI resources effectively
Generative AI can be a helpful tool for research, studying, and writing—as long as it’s used ethically. It’s great for brainstorming, summarizing, and generating ideas, but it shouldn’t replace your own thinking or compromise academic integrity. When used to support (not substitute) your work, it can enhance your academic success.
Learn what it's useful for and how to prompt effectively.
Remember to always verify the information it gives you.
See all of our FAQs about generative AI.
See here for more information on the University of Iowa's AI strategy and guiding principles and Action plan.
Different courses will have different policies
Check with your instructor for EACH COURSE to find out the policy on using ChatGPT, Co-Pilot or any other similar tool.
What is AI good for and not so good for?
First of all, how does it work?!
Generative AI- trained on data. It uses that data to create more data, following the rules and patterns it has learned.
- Training on language - learn patterns in language - how words relate to each other, how sentences are structured, ideas are expressed
- Predict the next word- “The sky is…” the model might predict “blue”
- Understand context - moves beyond simple autocomplete, understands long conversations and complex questions
- Generate a response - doesn’t search the internet (unless connected to a search tool like Copilot) tries to give most likely and relevant answer based on your prompt
Remember, you'll always need to verify the information, because Copilot and ChatGPT will sometimes make things up (known as "hallucinations").
What is it good for?
- Brainstorming ideas
- Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper, and keywords for searching in library databases
See Generating Topics for Your Research Paper with Copilot
- 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?
- Library research (not yet). For now, it's best to use InfoHawk+, Library databases, or Google Scholar. See I can't find the citations that ChatGPT gave me. What should I do?
Note: You may want to try one of these tools that summarize web search results with generative AI.
- Perplexity AI
- Microsoft Copilot
- ChatGPT has a new web search feature. Click on the globe icon in the search box to activate it.
You may also want to try one of these tools that combine generative AI with academic searching, in order to summarize and find more sources with semantic searching.
- Asking for any information that would have dire consequences if it was incorrect (such as health, financial, legal advice, and so on). This is because of its tendency to sometimes make up answers, but still sound very confident.
- Last Updated: Oct 20, 2025 12:15 PM
- URL: https://guides.lib.uiowa.edu/AIStudentGuide
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