Generative AI and Copilot: Using Gen AI for Research

Generative AI tools can be incredibly powerful allies in your academic journey, but it’s crucial to use them ethically and responsibly. As students, you must ensure that all your submitted work truly reflects your understanding and is the result of your own effort. Doing so ensures you engage with your course learning, equipping you with the knowledge needed for a successful future in the industry.

This means that you should not use AI-generated outputs directly for your classwork, as this would breach Academic Integrity and could result in a finding of academic misconduct.

Instead, use gen AI as a part of your research process. This guide will help you use gen AI as a tool to help you study and learn for your assessments.

1. Understand

• Ask it to explain difficult concepts in varied ways and brainstorm topics (step outside yourself and your own biases).
• Use AI to convert your notes; convert to tables, timelines, summaries, mnemonic devices—be creative!
• Get it to quiz you on lecture notes and create practice questions for you to try.

2. Plan

• Ask it to break your assessment question down into tasks and a study schedule.
• Get it to create draft essay structures (suggesting paragraph structures for you).
• Use it to improve language learning by asking for feedback or recording presentations to practice your public speaking.

3. Search

• Use it to generate search keywords and synonyms to construct search strings (with full Boolean syntax).
• Get it to summarise articles to find relevant materials, before reading them in-depth.
• MAKE SURE TO USE THE LIBRARY SEARCH OR DATABASES FOR THE ACTUAL SEARCH

4. Critically assess your gen AI outputs

5. Keep Track of Your Gen AI Use

6. Acknowledge and reference your use of gen AI tools and outputs

These pages focus on Understanding your assignment topic, planning your work, and research strategies. Check out the Academic Skills @ ECU page on Using Generative AI for Assignments for other tips.

All gen AI use must align with ECU's five Ethical Principles:

 Courage - Integrity - Personal Excellence - Rational Inquiry - Respect 

You can achieve this by following the below principles:

Ethical Use and Integrity 

• Refer to your unit instructor for guidance on how gen AI can be used for assessment.
• Cite and acknowledge any use of gen AI according to ECU policies.
• Your own style and voice should be evident, simply rephrasing or copying gen AI outputs is not appropriate. Follow reference guidelines if direct quoting gen AI: software/apps, code, datasets, and AI tools.

Transparency

• Be transparent about the use of AI in your work by acknowledging use correctly.
• Keep track of how you use gen AI during the assignment process. See recording gen AI use later in this module.

Quality and Verification

• Exercise critical thinking and disciplinary expertise to verify the reliability and accuracy of gen AI outputs. See this critical assessment later in this module.
• Gen AI can "hallucinate" and invent sources. Using these sources will result in academic misconduct.
• Be aware of gen AI limitations and risks like inaccuracies or fabricated information.

Acknowledge Biases

See Charles Sturt University Library's excellent CC-BY licensed book Using AI tools at university for a guide on how to use various AI tools while undertaking university study and research.