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Faculty Guide

Guide to effectively using library resources and services at HIU.

Defining AI

Through machine learning, AI is a computer "program" that imitates human like interactions. By training an AI with thousands of books and articles, most AI has encyclopedic knowledge and can answer basic questions. Most AI is also trained with large data dumps of social media to help the AI with creating something akin to natural or current language. With a series of prompts most AI is capable of creating long form answers to questions and prompts. Those long form answers may be paragraphs or entire essays.

Because of the training of AI it is prone to certain problems.

  • All of the training was treated as equally correct. It learned facts from encyclopedias, but was also exposed to trash from social media. Most AI hold many contradictory ideas as being equally true. Donald Trump both won and lost the 2020 election.
  • It will be wrong with many answers (see above about training).
  • All of the training taught the AI certain genres and forms of literature. The AI will shape its answers/responses based on how you start a prompt. The AI have been known to be flirty because people asked it about itself (checking autonomy) which the AI recognized as flirting in social media. AI will also be mean and crude based on its training with AI. Start a prompt with brief terse words and respond in more brief interactions and the Ai will recognize a "flame war" or a fight from Twitter and Reddit. In a few sentences the AI will move from answers to all caps yelling to calling names.
  • Much of the AI training was with public domain (read that as really old) material. This leads to two distinct problems: the AI is prone to promote old, outdated, and disproven theories AND the AI will use language and terminology that is considered inappropriate now (sexist and racist comments are fairly common).

Most of this is called "hallucinations", but it is the AI relying on its training. "Garbage in. Garbage out."

Additionally, the AI is programmed to put words together based on probability of what should come next. It has learned what typically follows certain words or phrases. So, AI tends to be generic lifeless writing because it writes what is expected. It isn't creative with expressions.

Some Assignment Ideas to Stop the Bot (OK, really just speedbumps for the students)

  1. Require rough draft turned in early
  2. Require reference page turned in early
  3. Require more formats of information
  4. Require search strategy turned in as part of assignment
  5. Require resources come from library’s licensed database
  6. Require evaluation of resources (form, annotations, footnotes, or appendix)
  7. Require notes turned in with paper
  8. Require the student to interact with lectures and textbooks in the paper. Require personal connections.
  9. Use one of the AI detectors out there

List of Current AI Checkers (8/23)

The University also uses TurnItIn. TurnItIn has a built in originality checker and an AI detector. As an instructor you need to enable those items in Canvas

You may detect it yourself.

Look for the following:

  • perfect spelling
  • no contractions
  • good grammar
  • few, if any in-text citations
  • boring formulaic writing (the most common word choice and most common answers)
  • all sentences tend to be declarative. No rhetorical sentences in the text.
  • repetition
  • conclusion that begins "in conclusion" or "in summary"
  • missing reference page
  • few citations
  • citations to made-up books and articles (yes, AI makes them up)

To watch for (possible false positives):

  • formulaic writing will be tagged as AI
  • English language learners will often be tagged because they are writing generic 5 paragraph essays AND using translation tools
  • use of a translation tool (Google Translate and such)
  • students that "correct" all their grammar and spelling "errors" with Word or Grammarly (perfect spelling and grammar are marks of AI)

For More About AI

Much of this comes from: https://sites.google.com/view/practical-information-literacy/beating-ai - created by Steve Jung

On that site are links to two PowerPoints on AI.

The top PowerPoint was delivered to the faculty of HIU for the Spring faculty in-service meeting in March 2023.

The other PowerPoint was delivered as a sponsored webinar for Atla (formerly the American Theological Library Association) and emphasizes the changes need to academic integrity statements because of artificial intelligence.

For a Glossary of Terms