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Introduction

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology attempts to replicate human intelligence and problem solving tasks (Investopedia, 2024). John McCarthy (2019) coined the term as "the science and engineering of making intelligent machines." AI is used in many settings and situations to help humans to solve problems and speed up routine activities.

This guide will focus on generative AI, although there are multiple categories of AI.

You may already be using AI in your studies, for example search tools or spell check tools. These are categorised as narrow AI tools - designed to carry out a particular task (Banafa, 2024).

Some examples of narrow AI include:

  • Navigation applications and search tools
  • Spell check
  • Face ID
  • Self-driving cars

Generative AI is a type of narrow AI which tends to be more complex and carries out tasks like problem solving. Generative AI tools use more complex machine learning to learn, think and perform actions similar to a human (Kaplan, 2024).

Some examples of generative AI include:

  • Chatbots and text generation tools
  • AI image generation tools
  • AI music or video generation tools

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence. It uses predictive algorithms and large language models to rapidly produce content from a request or prompt it is given. Additionally, the content it produces does not have to be programmed (Kaplan, 2024). The results range from images, music and video to software code and text. There are many tools available, all which are trained on large datasets of various sizes. It’s important to understand how to critically evaluate the content produced by these tools as the information we can get from them is not always reliable.

Some generative AI tools can produce plausible sounding content that is factually incorrect, outdated and even nonsensical. Using any generative AI tool to generate content comes with some risk and it is important to evaluate what is produced carefully and use these tools ethically (Kaplan, 2024).

 

University of South Australia. (2023, July 26). Generative AI explained by UniSA Online [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/71-NOcQnF8w

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