Utilizing GenAI tools effectively involves choosing the right tool for the task at hand, crafting prompts that generate the output you want/expect, AND using the tools ethically and with integrity. This section of the guide focuses on crafting prompts and evaluating and choosing specific tools.
✔️ Be sure to fact-check any AI-generated content and verify sources, especially if you plan to use the content in the work you share with others and/or publish.
✔️ Students should only use these tools within the guidelines established by instructors and the Academic Integrity Office.
✔️ Employees should follow guidelines established by their employer, whether that is UC San Diego or another entity.
❌ Do not include anyone's Personal Identifiable Information (PII) in your prompts, whether it is your own or someone else's.
Many tech reviewers have published comparisons between popular AI chatbots, but the landscape changes rapidly.
This guide primarily features free and freemium tools. We recommend experimenting with these options before investing in any paid subscriptions. Unless you need a feature that is unique to another tool, we also highly recommend choosing chatbots that connect to the internet and provide links so that you can verify their claims.
Google Gemini is a multimodal AI model powering Google's AI chatbot and integrated across its products, capable of understanding and generating diverse data.
Meta's popular, open source Llama model powers many different tools. Meta AI's assistant is available as a stand-alone app and infused throughout Meta's products like Facebook and Instagram. The assistant in Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp messengers is designed to provide personalized and empathetic responses, understand context and nuances of human conversations, and offer creative solutions and ideas.
Sign in with your ucsd.edu email address. Dimensions is a linked research data platform, including information on publications, research funding, patents and clinical trials, all on an international scale. Dimensions is designed to help anyone involved in research to gain better knowledge about activity in their research area or institution, and how it has changed over time. The Library has an institutional account with added functionality
Includes AI summarizer feature, Dimensions Research GPT (Dimensions’ scientific evidence + ChatGPT), and Chat with this PDF in Papers integration.
Most major AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Perplexity, TritonGPT) can now accept uploads of whole documents to summarize. Some of these other tools have additional features.
✔️ Students take note: please make sure that you are using these in accordance with your instructor's rules on use of generative AI and the Academic Integrity Office's guidelines.
✔️ If you have questions or concerns, please consult your instructor first.
AI-powered image generation uses deep learning models to create novel visuals from text prompts, sketches, or reference images. By training on massive datasets of photographs, paintings, and other imagery, these models learn to map textual concepts and visual patterns into coherent, high-quality outputs. Users can describe a scene in words and the model interprets that description to produce a matching image.
Open source image generators invite community involvement, transparency, and customization by publishing their model weights, training code, and sample notebooks. Open source models empower researchers and artists to experiment, audit, and adapt the technology. Two leading examples are Stable Diffusion and FLUX.
LoRAs are lightweight modules that augment a pre-trained image model without retraining all of its parameters. By combining open source backbones like Stable Diffusion or FLUX with curated LoRA modules, artists and developers gain maximum creative control while keeping computation costs low.
Most AI image generating sites operate on a freemium model where users are allotted a set number of credits. For many tools, the credits reset daily or monthly, but some tools provide only a one-time allotment. Users who pay for accounts can generally unlock more credits and/or premium features. We do not recommend paying for any sites without further research.
DALL-E is OpenAI's text-to-image model. DALL-E 3 is included in a ChatGPT Plus subscription or available for free via Copilot Design.
FLUX.1 is a suite of advanced text-to-image models known for their exceptional image detail, prompt adherence, style diversity, and scene complexity. FLUX is developed by Black Forest Labs, which was founded by former researchers from Stability AI.
Stable Diffusion is a family of popular open source text-to-image models created by Stability AI. Anyone can download and run the code on their own PC, and a plethora of generative AI sites have incorporated Stable Diffusion code into their tools in both its original form and modified through low-ranking adaptation (LoRA), an AI training technique that helps to fine-tune the models.
