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AI Literacy: Tool Comparison

General guide to AI usage.

Finding the Right Tool

AI Tools (MIT Sloan) - Browsable list of AI tools; organized into three categories: Writing and Content Creation Tools, Data Analysis and Quantitative Tools, and Image Generation Tools. 

Futurepedia - a free site listing different AI tools and their uses.

Ithaka GenAI Tracker -  a site which lists generative AI products that are either marketed specifically towards postsecondary faculty or students or appear to be actively in use by postsecondary faculty or students for teaching, learning, or research activities.

Which AI Tool for the Task? (UA Libraries) 

Beyond ChatGPT (UA Libraries) 

AI Tools for Research

AI tools can be useful in the research process, such summarizing a body of research, looking for related research, and organizing literature reviews.  Before you start using one of the below apps make sure you check with your professor as to whether or not it is ok for you to do so, and make sure you understand the ethical consideration, such as privacy and copyright, before using.

According to AI expert Ethan Mollick, it takes around 10 hours of use to become proficient with GenAI or other innovative AI apps. Before using with your assignments as an instructor or student, make sure you put in the time to understand these tools

Uses
Tool
Cost

Background Research

Perplexity: AI powered search engine that provides concise answers using web-based resources. Use to generate terms, become familiar with new topics, or to ask question about your research.

Free to use; Pro subscription allows unlimited searching, different LLM sources, and data visualizations

Translation

Useful for translating research articles into or out of English.

ChatPDF: upload PDF, limited to 2 PDFs a day at 120 pages each

ChatGPT: copy and paste text, limited to 4,000 tokens

ChatPDF:  Free for up to 2 PDFs (less than 120 pages); Plus subscription allows unlimited numbers of PDFs

ChatGPT:  Free uses older LLM data; Pro subscription uses newer LLM, and includes other AI apps

Searching for scholarly articles

Semantic Scholar: use author, title, or DOI for searching, and the app will bring up related research.

Consensus: an academic search database that lets you input research questions, view aggregated research article results with summations of widely accepted studies.

Scite_: Analyzes scientific articles citation patterns to help construct components of a literature review and support critical analysis. 

Semantic Scholar:  Free with Sign Up

Consensus: Free with Sign Up; Premium subscription allows unlimited use of some features

Scite_:  Requires a subscription to use.

Citation tracing for literature reviews

Connected Papers: Creates visual maps of related academic papers.

Research Rabbit: Uses data from Semantic Scholar to explore similar works and authors.

LitMaps: Uses a single relevant paper to locate other articles of interest and generate a visual literature map to explore for your literature review.

Inciteful: Provides related papers to key articles, and illustrates how different papers are related to one another through the literature. Especially helpful for multi-disciplinary research.

Connected Papers:  Free for up to 5 graphs a month; Academic subscription allows unlimited use.

Research Rabbit: Free

LitMaps:  Free for limited searches and data visualizations; Pro subscription allows for unlimited searches and visualizations

Inciteful:  Free to use

Brainstorming Concepts/Ideas

ChatGPT: Create prompts for subtopics, organize/outline a paper, and brainstorm open data sources; not suitable for producing citations; all content input into ChatGPT becomes useable by OpenAI

Elicit: AI research assistant that allows you to type in a research question or upload example articles; returns related questions, subject headings, and keywords to make optimize database searching.

ChatGPT:  Free uses older LLM data; Pro subscription uses newer LLM, and includes other AI apps

Elicit:  Free with sign up, restricts usage beyond pre-set credit allowance; Pro subscription gives you 12,000 credits to use per month, and you can purchase more.

Comprehension of Research

ChatPDF: Ask questions of uploaded documents, guided by AI.

Consensus: Provides study snapshots with population, sample size, methods, and outcomes; the synthesize feature provides a summary of all results and offers consensus graph.

ChatPDF:  Free for up to 2 pdfs (less than 120 pages); Plus subscription allows unlimited numbers of PDFs

Consensus: Free with Sign Up; Premium subscription allows unlimited use of some features

Considerations for choosing which AI model to use