When you do research, you are not only using information but also creating information in the form of the paper, presentation, or other research product that results from your work.
In some ways, creating information can be the hardest part of research, especially if you are not confident in your writing or presentation abilities. How do you make decisions about what information to use and what information to discard? How do you organize everything? How do you sound adequately authoritative?
Making decisions like these is a skill that you will develop as you do more and more research. This is a learning process.
Like all learning processes, it can be easy to make mistakes or to feel embarrassed if you don’t get something quite right.
Getting generative AI to do the work of creating information for you—by generating an essay or presentation or some other information product—can be tempting as a way to avoid these potential mistakes and embarrassment. But if you use generative AI in this way, you may miss out on some necessary learning both about the topic you are researching and the research process itself.
Of course, your learning journey is your own and as long as you’re operating within the ethical boundaries of a given situation (such as following any course policies set by your instructor), then it’s up to you what that journey looks like and how you navigate it. What matters is whether you feel you are getting value from your education.
In the meantime, let’s think about some aspects of using generative AI to create information (really, generate rather than create) as part of the research process.
How would you feel if you found out that the content of this guide had been generated by AI rather than a human author?
Chances are, not great. Your perception of the quality of the information in the guide and the authoritativeness of the author would almost certainly go down compared to a human-authored text.
What about if your professor used AI to generate a lecture for their course or feedback on work you submitted? Or your boss at a job used AI to respond to your emails? Or if you found out someone you follow on social media was using AI to generate all of their posts?
If this was happening and you knew about it, your perception of the quality of the information, its authoritativeness, and the value of your experience with the information would all likely go down.
Research shows that information generated by AI is generally perceived more negatively than information that is authored by a human.
This may change as we get more used to encountering AI-generated information (or information that was generated with assistance from AI) but for now it’s important to keep this in mind when using AI to generate information yourself: using AI to create information for you may have a negative effect on how others perceive the information you are creating, even if that information sounds more confident or accurate than you would be able to sound on your own.
P.S. The content of this guide was human-authored except where labeled otherwise. :)
Whether you realize it or not, you have developed a “voice” that is represented in all of the information that you communicate. (More accurately, you have developed a variety of voices that you use for different audiences.) This voice is important because it is unique to you.
AI tools also have a “voice.” The default voice of most of these tools might seem better than yours in some ways because it is confident and authoritative (even when it’s wrong). It also features correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation which can be hard to do on your own.
AI’s default voice is also very bland and boring. Additionally, it reflects a way of communicating that is considered white, Western, and educated, perpetuating bias and potentially erasing ways of communicating that do not conform to these ideas.
Of course, you can prompt AI to write in a different voice or even to learn your voice and generate information in a way that sounds like you. You can even simply edit the information an AI generates to incorporate more of your own voice.
These are practices that may become more common as AI becomes more incorporated into how we communicate.
For now, reflect on the following:
