Ethics and Artificial Intelligence in Library Research
Using AI tools like Copilot, Claude, or ChatGPT in your library research can be helpful. Keep some ethical guidelines in mind while you do it.
Verify your sources and citations
If you ask an AI to help you find sources for a literature review, verify the source to make sure it is academic in nature. If your instructor has asked for peer-reviewed sources, double-check that what the AI found is peer-reviewed. Popular AIs are not databases of information, instead they generate text for you using the probability the next word they generate is the “right” one. So, citations often contain errors in the authorship, title, and DOI links.
Respect the work of Creators
Respect the copyright of authors and other creators by not feeding their work into AI tools to generate summaries for you. Uploading their work into AI tools is like sharing a copyrighted work with someone who hasn’t paid for it.
Increasingly, our library databases contain AI tools that can summarize the article or ebook that you are reading. These tools still make mistakes or miss the content relevant to your research, but at least they have permission to ingest the work of the writers in the database.
Always cite AI when you have used it in your work. Learn how to Cite the Use of AI tools.