Guides: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guide: AI Literacy

What is Generative AI?

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new content, such as text, images, or music based on learned data. It works by learning patterns from large amounts of existing data and then using that knowledge to produce original outputs that mimic human creativity.

What are Large Language Models?

What are Large Language Models?

A large language model is a type of artificial intelligence that can understand and generate human language. It learns from analyzing a vast amount of text data, recognizing patterns and structures in the language. This allows it to generate responses, answer questions, write stories, and perform other language-related tasks in a way that mimics human conversation and writing.

What Tasks Does Generative AI Excel At?

What Tasks Does Generative AI Excel at?

Summarizing long texts or articles. AI excels at translating complex quantitative findings into clear, everyday language, making research accessible to a broader audience.
Generating keywords for searching databases
Refining and receiving critiques on your own writing
Brainstorming ideas
Creating outlines
Feedback on grammar
Analyzing excel files

What are Some Concerns with Generative AI?

What are some concerns with Generative AI?

Library databases and Google Scholar are superior for locating articles. AI can generate hallucinate citations and lacks access to as many sources.
There is a lack of transparency regarding the internal workings of AI, and the sources of AI are not disclosed.
While using AI to refine one's writing is ethically permissible, using AI to compose entire works raises concerns.

What does thoughtful use of AI look like in practice?*

Use AI to explore ideas that you might not have previously considered
Critically evaluate the outputs of AI-generated content
Refine and personalize AI outputs to reflect your voice and thought processes
Understand when AI is helpful and when human thinking is better
Be aware of AI's limitations and biases
Take responsibility for the final product, regardless of the tools used

*This question and the subsequent practices were adapted from Carlo Iacono's blogpost, "Agency, AI and the Future of Learning".

Popular AI programs

ChatGPT
Bothe free and paid versions are available. ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It is currently based on the GPT-4o large language model (LLM).
Gemini (Google)
Both free and paid versions are available. If you are searching the free version, you will have to log in to a "Non-Pepperdine” Google account.
Claude
Performs a variety of tasks such as writing, analysis, math, and coding. Allows attaching documents or text for analysis. The knowledge base for each Claude model has a cutoff date for its training data. Paid versions can search the live internet.
Google NotebookLM
NotebookLM does not use your personal data, including your source uploads, queries, and the responses from the model for training. Upload PDFs, websites, YouTube videos, audio files, Google Docs, or Google Slides, and NotebookLM for free will summarize them and make interesting connections between topics, all powered by Gemini 2.0. The Audio Overview feature can turn your sources into engaging “Deep Dive” discussions with one click.
Microsoft Copilot
Offers the ability to upload documents for review and does live Internet searches.
Grammarly
This program is more specialized and primarily assist users with grammar. There are free and paid versions.

GSEP has purchased a license with Grammarly@EDU available to currently enrolled GSEP students. New students will receive a direct invitation sent to their Pepperdine email address by around the 3rd week of the term.

For new Pepperdine Graziadio students who started in this current term, you will receive an account activation email from Grammarly EDU during week three of the new term.
Quillbot
This program is more specialized and primarily assist users with grammar. There are free and paid versions.
Scite.ai
Scite.ai is designed to assist researchers and academics in evaluating the credibility and impact of scientific papers. It analyzes the citation context of scholarly articles, helping users understand how a paper has been cited and in what context.

Cost: Scite currently costs $20 a month for an individual subscription.
Duck.ai
Duck.ai is a browser based platform that provides anonymous access to popular AI models, including GPT-4o mini, Claude 3, and open-source Llama 3.3 and Mistral.
Answerthis.io
Answerthis.io is an AI research tool that can generate literature reviews based on natural language queries. You can request summaries of papers, receive paragraph-by-paragraph citations and access relevant sources.

Answerthis.io is a paid tool that with limited free features.
Keenious
Keenious is a resource recommender tool designed to aid in the identification and discovery of scholarly research. It analyzes writing from text documents and PDFs to recommend the most relevant articles and topics to explore using artificial intelligence combined with conventional search algorithms.

Keenious uses data from OpenAlex, which contains over 240 million works of both open and non-open access journal articles. OpenAlex includes material predominantly in English.
Midjourney
Midjourney is a paid text-to-image AI generation tool. Images can be generated through the Create page on the Midjourney website or through the dedicated Discord server.