Before using generative AI for any purpose, there are some general cautions to take into consideration. Make sure to take these into account and keep them in mind any time you use an AI tool.
- Academic integrity: Using generative AI for your course work can be a violation of academic integrity. Always check with your professor before using generative AI for an assignment (see the previous page for some tips).
- Hallucinations: Generative AI gets things wrong. Sometimes it even seems to make things up. Because AI is designed to sound authoritative, this can be easy to miss or dismiss. However, no information that a generative AI tool gives you should be accepted as true without checking other sources.
- Ethics and transparency: Many of the companies that created generative AI tools did so by training their tools on copyrighted data that they did not have permission to use. This essentially means that these AI tools were created using work stolen from others. Almost everyone who has ever published or shared an image or text on the internet was affected by this theft, likely including you.
- User data and transparency: Generative AI companies are not transparent about how they use our information when we sign up to use those tools and how they use the information we put into those tools through our prompts and interactions with them. Whatever protection someone is given is going to be different depending on whether someone is using the free version of the tool or the paid version of it.
- Unpaid labor: Every time you use a generative AI tool, you are participating in the training of that tool and helping it learn. This is essentially the same as providing free labor to the company that created the tool (or, if you pay for a subscription to the tool, paying for the privilege of providing your labor).
- Environmental impacts: Generative AI requires enormous amounts of energy and fresh water to work. This means that every time you use an AI tool, you are having an impact on the environment.
