Definition of Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Welcome to this library guide on artificial intelligence/AI. This guide is a useful resource that will allow you to get more familiar with AI, some key concepts, impacts and approaches. Contact the library if you have any suggestions or feedback on the content.
What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
From social media to tourism, from public service to the service industry, people are interacting with artificial intelligence every day and have been so doing so for quite some time! Virtual assistants or chatbots are an example of this. However, in more recent times we have reached the next level, Generative AI.
Generative AI
Generative AI are systems and tools that can produce or generate new text, images, or other media (hence the name generative). For example, Chat GPT (by OPEN AI) was launched in November 2022 and is now a well-known AI tool of this class. It is designed for natural language understanding and generation, and can produce convincing and engaging human-like conversations based on your input.
ChatGPT can be used to assist in understanding complex topics, as a writing assistant, and/or creating text for various purposes, including planning, and providing information. Additionally, Microsoft Copilot functions in a similar way.
More Generative AI examples
Scribe - an AI platform that makes documenting process, and creating standard operating procedures (SOPs) easy!
Deep Dream Generator - AI text to image generator.
Short Introduction
AI Literacy
It is important that researchers, educators, and students make ethical and responsible choices when it comes to incorporating AI tools into their workflows. AI Literacy can help us to do this.
AI literacy is defined as “the skills associated with the ability to comprehend the basic principles, concepts, and applications of artificial intelligence, as well as the implications, limitations, and ethical considerations associated with the use of artificial intelligence”.
Congress of the United States of America
In keeping with this definition of AI Literacy, this guide seeks to outline a non-technical overview of the basic principles of AI technologies and aims to encourage users to reflect on the where, how and why they use AI assistive tools in their studies and research. For further information please see AI Literacy section on this LibGuide.