Skip to Main Content

Artificial Intelligence

Chatbots

ChatGPT

  • OpenAI’s large language model chatbot
  • The version of ChatGPT that is free to the public uses ChatGPT3.5, which cannot access the internet. In order to use the newer ChatGPT4, which can access the internet in order to generate answers, you must buy a $20 a month subscription
  • ChatGPT3.5 (the free, publicly accessibly ChatGPT) version was trained on data from before 2021, so it can’t pull from any newer data to create responses to user queries
  • OpenAI's Prompt Engineering Guide

Bard

  • Google’s large language model response to ChatGPT, which works very similarly, but instead of a single response it gives you options that each have a slightly different “voice”: simple, long, short, professional or casual
  • A lot of online discussion of this tool says that it can search the internet in order to create its responses to you, but the MIT Technology review disagrees: “Bard does not look up search results—all the information it returns is generated by the model itself. But it is still designed to help users brainstorm and answer queries. Google wants Bard to become an integral part of the Google Search experience.” (Heaven 2023)
  • The other interesting thing about Bard is that it does provide links to internet sources related to your query

Bing Chat

  • Bing Chat is located where the Bing search used to be, it’s now the default, though you can still select the regular old search instead
  • You have to have Microsoft Edge to use Bing Chat
  • You have to sign into your Microsoft account to use Bing Chat
  • Like Bard, Bing Chat has conversation “styles”: creative, balanced, and precise
  • Bing Chat also uses GPT4, the newest version of the AI which powers ChatGPT. The free ChatGPT uses GPT3.5, and the paid subscription-only ChatGPT uses GPT 4. So it’s like you get to use ChatGPT 4’s fanciest AI model, but for free
  • There are limits to using Bing Chat: 20 queries per conversation, and 150 conversations per day
  • Like Bard, Bing does provide links to internet sources where it gathered its responses
  • Search history is saved in your Microsoft account unless you change your preferences
  • This 2023 Maria Diaz Verge article has a good how-to video for Bing Chat

Citation and Research Assistance Tools

The following tools were developed to assist with research tasks:

CitationChaser

CitationChaser performs backwards and forwards citation analysis to an inputted article.

Consensus

Consensus is a search engine that uses AI to extract and distill findings from peer-reviewed sources. Subject matter coverage ranges from medical research and physics to social sciences and economics. It utilizes the Semantic Scholar dataset.

Elicit

This tool helps automate research workflows, like creating literature reviews, brainstorming, summarization, and text classification. Elicit utilizes the Semantic Scholar dataset.

Polyglot

Polyglot Search Translator will translate a provided search phrase designed for PubMed into appropriate syntax for various academic databases. Note: It cannot look up equivalent subject headings for various databases, outputs must be verified.

PubMed PubReMiner

PubReMiner is a tool provided by PubMed that conducts text mining and subject heading searches based on a set of relevant PMIDs (PubMed unique identifiers). It can also help identify top authors in a field.

Research Rabbit

This will provide a seed article that allows you to retrieve recommended papers, visualize networks of papers and authors, and get alerts about additional relevant research. It integrates with Zotero and allows for collaborative research sharing.

Semantic Scholar

A project at the Allen Institute for AI, it indexes over 200 million academic papers sourced from publisher partnerships, data providers, and web crawls.

Yale MeSH Analyzer

Enter up to 20 PubMed unique identifiers (PMIDs) of records that are relevant to your topic and then visualize, in a tabular format, what MeSH terms were assigned to the records. Allows you to visually analyze any patterns of assigned MeSH terms, e.g., more frequently used MeSH terms.

ChatGPT and Bing Chat Generative AI Legal Research Guide (University of Arizona Law Library)

Image-generating AI

Dall-E2

  • created by OpenAI
  • "DALL·E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language." OpenAI 2023
  • free if you registered before Apr. 6, $15 minimum if you register after

Bing Image Creator

  • created by Microsoft
  • powered by Dall-E AI
  • produces 4 images per prompt
  • must log into a Microsoft account to use
  • access this tool in the same place as Bing Chat: "To get your image, all you have to do is ask Bing Chat to draw you any prompt you'd like." (Ortiz 2023)

DreamStudio

  • created by Stability AI
  • runs on SDXL 1.0 AI
  • 1 image per 1.8 credits, $1 per 100 credits, 25 free credits when you open account, by purchase once you run out
  • this is the online version of the Stable Diffusion downloadable AI image-generation program
  • can specify in your prompt what you don't want in the image

Resources on learning how to use AI

Which AI Tool Should I Use?

Which AI tool for your task?

Since there are so many generative AI tools these days, it can be difficult to decide which one to use for a particular task.

A helpful way to think about this is to look at whether the tool is grounded in a source of facts.

Not grounded - these models rely only on their training data

  • ChatGPT (free) - trained up to Oct. 2023
  • Claude (free & paid) - trained up to April 2024

Grounded - these models can also use web search results or other types of search results (see below)

Wordsmithing tasks (that don't involve search)

Task Use any of these free tools
  • Brainstorming ideas or examples
     
  • Narrowing your topic ideas for a research paper
     
  • Get ideas for keywords to search in library databases
     
  • Summarizing and outlining information
     
  • Changing the writing level of some text (5 years old, high school, college, faculty level)
     

  • Changing the writing style (make it more humorous, more formal, more satirical, more diplomatic, etc.)

All of these tools also have paid versions that are more capable.
  • Upload documents and summarize them, create study guides, FAQs, audio overview, and more.

Tasks that involve searching

For any of these tasks... Use any of these free tools
  • Finding and summarizing websites that answer your question
     
  • Asking questions or getting a summary of information on a specific website
    Example: Please summarize this: [your link here]

These summarize results from web search and link to the sources.
  • Finding scholarly articles
     
  • Summarizing a particular scholarly article
     
  • Asking questions of a particular scholarly article
     
  • Uploading the PDF of a scholarly article and asking questions or getting a summary.

Start with library databases and Google Scholar. 
Their coverage is more comprehensive than the tools below.

Then try these additional tools.
Use these to find additional sources that may not have appeared with keyword searching. They use semantic searching, some of them based on Semantic Scholar, others on OpenAlex.

They also include generative AI features, like natural language queries, summarizing, outlining, etc.

These are not 100% free, as most have usage limits.