How to use

QUT has a policy regarding Academic Integrity (Manual of Policies and Procedures (MOPP) at MOPP C/5.3 Academic Integrity) and guidelines on HiQ online: Academic integrity and plagiarism - Student - QUT Portal

Please refer to the Digital Workplace page on Artificial Intelligence and Assessment on why to use AI, embedding AI literacies, the requirements to communicate expectations to students, the GenAI tools for use in learning and teaching at QUT, designing assessment incorporating GenAI and mitigating its use in assessment design. 

Research Students: QUT offers training and workshops for research students about the responsible use of AI in research writing. You can access the module at any time and move through it at your own pace. Responsible use of AI in Research Writing - Research students - QUT Portal

GenAI tools work by giving the program a prompt, or instructions, to follow. A good prompt generates basic text that needs tweaking; a great prompt is specific and useful to the user. Great prompts have some or all of the following elements: 

• Give the AI a persona. 
• Be specific, clear, and concise. Define what you are looking for. For example, 'list the top 10 places to visit in the UK'. 
• Provide content and avoid ambiguity. Open-ended prompts are not narrow enough to generate a meaningful response. 
• Provide specific constraints, such as a target length or tone, to guide the model's response. For example, 'aExplain 10 year old...'
• Make it conversational and use complete sentences. 
• Additionally, a good prompt should have a clear and achievable goal that the model can work towards.

Try the following two prompts in MS Copilot and see the difference: 

• What are some ideas for a birthday party? 
• You are a high-end birthday planner. Plan a birthday party for a five-year-old girl with a budget of $5,000. Her favourite colour is pink and she likes dinosaurs. There will be 20 guests of the same age and the party will be held outside in May in Brisbane, Australia. 

There are many different generative AI tools available, with more being developed every day. HiQ Virtual and the Digital Workplace offer a list of QUT-endorsed tools with AI functionality. 

Other tools may require accounts and/or paid subscriptions to access. Always read the team and conditions as well as the privacy statement before use to ensure you are aware of how your information may be used. 

Considerations include copyright and intellectual property and data security and accessibility. 

Warning: Using non-endorsed AI tools can expose the university’s data or personal information to the public. So, always use approved technologies to help keep our staff and student information safe.

Due to data security, intellectual property and privacy concerns, staff must not require students to use GenAI for learning and assessment outside of those tools provided by QUT. Staff also should not upload student work to any external system.

Text Generation 

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a GenAI chatbot that has been developed by OpenAI. It is an example of a Large Language Model (LLM) that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to generate content in a conversational tone. 

Microsoft Copilot is an AI-powered digital assistant that aims to provide personalized assistance to users. It incorporates ChatGPT with the MS Office environment and is available to QUT staff and students. 

Possible uses of these tools:

• Provide feedback on the quality of writing, grammar, spelling and coherence. Can also suggest improvements to layout, structure, phrasing and sentence structure.
• Summarise large amounts of information, including class or research notes.
• Produce practice tests with a variety of question styles. 
• Help overcome the "fear of a blank page" by providing stimulus or generating ideas to extend and develop.
• Assist with time organisation. 

Limitations: 

• Sources are not referenced or cited and you are unable to see how it reached the answer.
• Can provide incorrect information with certainty (known as hallucinations).
• May be too generic or contain biases.
• Can misinterpret the given prompt. 
• Copyright and data security considerations around input of material. 

Image Generation 

Stable Diffusion is an AI art generator that enables users to create unique imagery from short text descriptions, also known as prompts.

DALL·E 2 is an AI system that enables users to create images and art from a text description in natural language.

Possible uses: 

• Create unique images for presentations.
• Turn concepts into images with little to no artistic ability or experience.
• Can provide creative inspiration. 

Limitations: 

• Unknown copyright implications if copyrighted works from other artists were used to train the model.
• Quality of images can vary. 
• Making changes to an image can be difficult. 

Research Assistance

Elicit is an AI research assistant that uses machine learning to help automate parts of the research workflow. It can find relevant papers without perfect keyword matches, and summarise and extract key information from the papers.

Scite is a platform that helps researchers discover and evaluate scientific articles using Smart Citations. Smart Citations show the context and the classification of how a publication has been cited by other publications, whether it provides supporting or contrasting evidence for the cited claim.

Enago Read and genei can summarise PDFs and web pages and extract keywords. 

Possible uses:

• Compare and evaluate how you have interpreted a research paper.
• Locate other research papers that might relate to your topic.
• Summarise papers and extract keywords.

Limitations:

• Can provide incorrect information with certainty (known as hallucinations).
• Can provide inaccurate analysis or evaluation of a research paper.
• Might miss relevant papers or words. 
• License agreements around the use of copyrighted material may prevent you from uploading resources. Always read the database terms and conditions.