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AI: Student Guide to ChatGPT, CoPilot and Other AI Resources

Guide content supports the teaching and research goals of multiple departments on campus. Content represents a non-exhaustive selection of essential resources and tools for engaging a wide range of backgrounds and viewpoints

Using ChatGPT and other AI resources effectively

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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.

  1. Training on language - learn patterns in language - how words relate to each other, how sentences are structured, ideas are expressed
  2. Predict the next word- “The sky is…” the model might predict “blue” Abstracted circuit icon
  3. Understand context - moves beyond simple autocomplete, understands long conversations and complex questions
  4. 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?

Note: You may want to try one of these tools that summarize web search results with generative AI.

  1. Perplexity AI
  2. Microsoft Copilot
  3. 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.