Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Brainstorm: Chatbot tools such as Chat-GPT, Copilor, and Gemini may be helpful for brainstorming ideas for research topics, organizing your thoughts, jump-starting your work and tackling writer's block.
• Break down concepts: Chatbot tools such as Chat-GPT, Copilot, and Gemini may help you break down and understand a complex concept or assignment prompt.
• Illustrate: Image generation tools are now embedded in some LLMs such as Gemini and Copilot for illustrating your work.
• Create: Many AI tools may be useful for creative adaptations.
• Translate: AI tools may help you translate between languages.
• Code: AI tools such as GitHub Copilot may help you generate new code and clean up existing code.

• Hallucinations: When using AI tools such as Microsoft CoPilot or ChatGPT for research, they may make up credible-sounding citations to sources that do not exist, or give inaccurate information, which is called “hallucinating.”
• Paywalled content: Many tools do not have access to the full range or full text of articles that are behind a paywall. They cannot fully substitute for a human being with access to library databases for research.
• Scope of training data: AI tools can only produce based on the data they have been trained on, so it is important to understand what comprises the training data and the date ranges included. For example, as of 2025, ChatGPT 4 mini (free version) is only trained on content ingested from the open, non-paywalled Web through October 2023.
• Reproducibility: Because generative AI tools such as Copilot and ChatGPT create new content based on their training data, the content it creates is not reproducible. In addition, because these tools create new content, you may find that multiple people using the same prompt at the same time will get different results.
• Ethics, Privacy, etc.: There are numerous limitations related to ethics, privacy, bias, labor and environmental impact outlined on the Ethics and Privacy page.
• Legal Context: US laws related to AI tools are evolving, and tools to identify AI-created content are not fully effective. See Copyright page for more information about copyright and intellectual property.

Check out this LibGuide from Germanna Comunity College in VA: