Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft's AI, Copilot, is recommended to UMGC students in many classes where you practice AI skills, such as PACE and LIBS 150. 

You can login to Copilot using your UMGC username and password.

(If prompted, choose Sign In "With a Work or School Account.") 

Copilot has advantages over other AI programs in terms of protecting your privacy: when you're logged in, you'll see the green "protected" logo in the upper-right of your screen. Copilot also has tools and guides to help you get the most out of it. It's like having the expensive, professional version of other AI programs, but for free, because you're a UMGC student!

ChatGPT responds to your prompts not like Google does--by finding you content and information--but rather by generating, or creating, new content. It's an amazing new tool that is revolutionizing human knowledge.

For more information about ChatGPT, see ChatGPT, a beginner's guide, from G-Shift labs.

Below is info about ChatGPT that will help you use it safely and effectively.

Understanding the terms of use of software like ChatGPT is important because they disclose what information of yours is collected, why they collected that information, how that information will be used, and what measures (if any) they take to protect your private information. Here's a summary of ChatGPT's terms of use:

• OpenAI's privacy policy allows them to share your data with third-party vendors, law enforcement, and other users.
• What is put into this software is not private. 
• Their Terms of Use state "you must be 18 years or older and able to form a binding contract with OpenAI to use the Services".
• Their Terms state that users must not "represent that output from the Services was human-generated when it is not". 
• What information gained from ChatGPT and OpenAI must be shared as from ChatGPT and OpenAI, meaning if it is used it a paper, it must be stated as from their services and not human generated. 
• Users are responsible for the content generated, "ensuring it does not violate any applicable laws or these Terms."
• While you can delete your ChatGPT account and no longer use it, your prompts and questions belong to OpenAI and become a part of the company’s collected data.

As you become more proficient with ChatGPT, these common browser extensions may prove useful. Please note, UMGC librarians cannot provide user support for non-library resources like these or for ChatGPT itself.

• ChatGPT for Search Engines

  Access the ChatGPT model from your search engine results to ask any question and get a natural language response. Available for Firefox, Edge, & Chrome.

• GPTZero

  GPTZero uses the technologies used to build ChatGPT to detect AI. It uses variables like perplexity (a measure of the accuracy of AI output) to fingerprint AI involvement.

• WebChatGPT

  This extension adds web results to your prompts to ChatGPT.

These AI tools, though less famous than ChatGPT, are similar and may be worth exploring. Please note that some may involve fees. And please remember, these are non-library resources for which UMGC librarians cannot give user support.

• Gemini – A Google product, previously called Bard, Gemini gives you direct access to Google AI. You can get help with writing, planning, learning, and more.
• Jasper – A commercial product, Jasper is designed for writing ad copy, blogs, and other content. Although primarily aimed at sales and marketing, it also has the capability of “improving” a piece of writing, can create or improve long form text (it advertises writing of books), operates in multiple languages, and does plagiarism and grammar checks.  It is one of the more frequently reviewed products in this space. It is fee based. 
• Writesonic – “Writesonic’s GPT-3 language model deploys powerful AI to generate blog posts, landing pages, adverts, product descriptions, and emails, so it’s a top choice if you need a versatile writing tool” (TechRadar, 2022). It works in multiple languages and  advertises a ChatSonic version (“like Chat GPT, but with superpowers”). Fee based.
• Article Forge – This tool advertises that it “writes entire 1,500+ word articles automatically” in about 60 seconds. Many of the others will write long format also, but this tool seems to be particularly designed for this. It also does plagiarism checking. Fee based. 
• WordAI – This company advertises that their tool is best at improving existing content.  This tool is a favorite (according to techradar) of people in tech.  It is more of a rewriting tool than a content creation tool. “This tool can totally restructure your sentences and paragraphs to make them easier and more pleasing to read, and WordAI will automatically add keywords, make your writing more varied and fix spelling and grammar mistakes. It can use AI to improve clarity, and it’ll avoid duplicated content and create up to 1,000 rewrites per article” (TechRadar, 2022). Fee  based.
• AI Writer – Like many of these tools, AI Writer is geared toward the production of web content and search engine optimization (SEO).  It is largely designed for sales and marketing. Unlike many of the other tools, AI Writer provides a list of sources and citations. Also does text rewording, although partly this is for SEO optimization, not just readability. Fee based.
• Ink – A relatively new product built on GPT-3, it is designed for expanding text you have written, rewriting/editing text, and generating text.  Like some other tools, it will give you multiple variations to choose from for each prompt.  It also includes grammar support and a readability score, so if you do your own writing/editing it shows you how the readability changes. Fee based. 
• Moonbeam – This tool has been mentioned in recent Inside Higher Ed articles on AI, probably because of Moonbeam's pricing and because it is trained to write essays, which makes it attractive for students. Free version as well as fee based.

Thank you to the University of Toronto Artificial Intelligence in Teaching & Learning curated bibliography for this information and descriptions. 

This guide was created by Julie Harding and Robert Miller, UMGC Library. 

Parts of this guide are adapted (with changes) or reused from a guide created by Bronte Chiang at the University of Calgary. The University of Calgary guide is under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. 

References on this page:

University of Toronto - Academic, Research & Collaborative Technologies (ARC). AI Readings.