Artificial intelligence (AI) is "any technology/machine that can perform complex tasks that are typically associated with human intelligence" (Notre Dame Learning). Whether you use facial recognition to unlock your phone, Spotify or YouTube generated playlists, or even speech-to-text to send messages, you are engaging in a form of AI.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is a type of AI that discerns patterns in existing data and produces new content based on those patterns. Popular GenAI tools include ChatGPT, Cluade, DALL-E, and Synthesia.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are a type of artificial intelligence that analyze large datasets to learn patterns and rules of language. They are the basis of GenAI (What is a LLM?)
While the library does not endorse any specific AI tool, we are here to help you understand this evolving technology, navigate the various AI tools available to you, and make informed decisions to develop your scholarly voice and researcher profile.
Through a process called training, GenAI tools analyze millions of human-authored texts to identify patterns. Chatbots like ChatGPT sound human because they were trained using human-authored texts to predict the most likely order of words.
ChatGPT was trained using a wide range of texts from the internet, including everything from Reddit posts to copyrighted journalism to academic scholarship. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it generates a response one word at a time by determining which word is most likely to follow the one that came before it.
For example, if you ask a chatbot to complete the sentence: I ordered a bowl of macaroni and ___, the bot would know, based on its training data, that the word cheese is more likely to complete the sentence than something like bubblegum.
Using a chatbot may feel like talking to a subject expert in real time, but they do not think about or analyze information the way a Cal State LA student, professor, or librarian would. In fact, GenAI chatbots are more like highly sophisticated fill-in-the-blank machines.
The definition for AI literacy is still evolving. Some habits of AI literacy present across various sources include:
Here are some resources that discuss AI literacy:
These videos from the Wharton School provide a helpful introduction to AI.
