Written by Thomas Basbøl
Like you, we are following developments in artificial intelligence with great interest here at the library.
We first began to notice it around Christmas last year, when our users came to us looking for books and papers that simply did not exist.
“Where did you get this reference?” we would ask and get the now familiar answer: “ChatGPT told me.”
Can ChatGPT cite sources?
A year later, AI has gotten much better at citing real sources. It is still not perfect, but it is clear that in the not-very-distant future, AI will offer a workable shortcut to finding useful information, especially at the undergraduate level. Many of our databases (e.g. Scopus and JSTOR) are already promoting test versions of AI assistants for doing literature reviews. These will not only find relevant sources based on natural language prompting, they will also generate competent-sounding prose summaries of the literature, which will be increasingly tempting to simply cut and paste into research papers.
This raises a number of important questions about citation and authorship that will no doubt challenge our intuitions about plagiarism in publication and cheating in examinations. The library, however, does not make the rules. We can only offer to help you think these questions through and explore the technology with you as it develops.
Be careful (as always)!
In practice, we urge caution. Though the technology is improving, it is not yet what we would call reliable. Exploring the literature through careful topic and citation searches, and of course, reading the sources yourself, is still the gold standard for scholarship. After all, good ideas are precisely those that are worth taking the time to read and write about yourself. It would be unfortunate if students and scholars ended up letting machines do their thinking for them.
If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact resident writing consultant Thomas Basbøll, academic integrity specialist Joshua Kragh Bruhn, or resource librarian Mette Bechmann.