How can Gen AI help you study?
GenAI tools are evolving incredibly quickly and their impact within education is significant and ongoing. When appropriate and permitted, GenAI tools can be used in many ways to support your study or research including creating content, exploring ideas or synthesising information.
There are numerous types of GenAI that can create music, art, video, text, code, equations or even a blend of these. HiQ Virtual and the Digital Workplace offer a list of QUT-endorsed tools with AI functionality. Using non-endorsed AI tools can expose the university’s data or personal information to the public.
GenAI tools can help you study more effectively, encourage your creativity and foster your critical thinking skills, for example it can be used to check your grammar or create an image. Find out more on how GenAI can help you study.
Remember, if you’re unsure whether you’re allowed to use generative AI in a particular situation, check with your unit coordinator or teaching team.
When using these tools you must consider copyright, intellectual property and data security. For advice on what you are allowed to input into a GenAI tool, refer to the Using GenAI with integrity page in HiQ.
Using articles, ebooks and other library resources in AI tools is not permitted unless explicitly authorised by the publisher or vendor. Your use of library resources must comply with the Library databases and search tools conditions of use.
You must not input or upload content to any sites or tools (GenAI included) that may distribute the information to another person, unless allowed by the vendor.
Note: Image generated using Microsoft Copilot, 2024 (https://copilot.microsoft.com/)
GenAI analyses the text from books, articles, and websites that it is trained on to find patterns and relationships in human language. Once it is trained, it can create new text based on an understanding of human language.
Microsoft Copilot is an advanced generative AI solution that's available for free using your QUT account. To help you take advantage of GenAI, make sure you're aware of how to use it appropriately to enhance your studies.
Possible uses of Copilot:
Limitations:
Other tools that you can use to support your studies are listed on the Software and learning tools page in HiQ, including Adobe (including Adobe Express and Adobe Firefly).
GenAI image tools can produce diverse images in a range of mediums, everything from photorealistic oil painting style to anime.
Adobe Firefly and Creative Cloud are endorsed for use at QUT. Under QUT's licence, Adobe software may be used by students for educational purposes only. All commercial use (including commercial research) or any storage of Sensitive Personal Data is prohibited.
Possible uses:
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Importantly, Gen AI tools inherit the bias of their training datasets and this can be apparent in both text-based outputs and image creation. For example, a prompt to generate an image of a doctor in a tool called Canva resulted in four pictures of older white males in white lab coats.
Note: Image generated using Canva, 2023 (https://www.canva.com/en_au/)
There are many GenAI tools that claim to automate parts of the research process and make long, complex texts easier to decipher. This type of AI often analyses research papers that users upload to extract key information or summarise a paper. they can also help with literature review mapping and citation.
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.
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Creating video content is time-consuming. You need a script or lyrics, recordings and then you need to edit. There are generative AI video programs that have been trained on some or all of these elements allowing you to control what is created.
Some examples of generative AI that can create audio content include AIVA, Soundful and Murf.ai.
Some examples of generative AI that can create videos include Gen-1 Runway and Invideo.
Learning to code is similar to learning a language, and can be just as hard. Instead of searching the internet for help when coders get stuck, GenAI models can now be used to help with generating and improving code or even finding errors.
This means that you could use a tool like GitHub Actions to reformat new code to match old, instead of spending hours manually formatting it yourself; or even build a complete website with no coding experience. But beware, it'll likely come at a cost.
Some examples of generative AI that can create code include ChatGPT, CodeT5 and Tabnine.
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