Artificial Intelligence Research Guide

Although generative AI chatbots can deliver answers to questions in a way that feels similar to Google, it's important to understand that these tools operate very differently from the search engines and retrieval systems that we're used to.

Google

Google helps users find and retrieve text or other information that already exists and has been published on the Internet. It does this by:

• identifying words and phrases in your search, 
• looking for existing sources that match these terms, and
• applying a ranking algorithm to identify the results that are likely to be most relevant. 

Chatbots

Where does the information come from?

• The free version of ChatGPT does not have real-time access to the Internet, and it is not searching an existing body of text for matches. Rather than pointing users to information that is already published on the Internet, it creates new text in response to a query in a conversational tone, based on the information that it was trained on. AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are trained on large repositories of data that are analyzed and develop patterns that generate responses to a question or prompt.
   
• When the chatbot provides an answer to a question, it will not immediately provide a reference for where the information came from. This is because it is pulling predictive language from a wide variety of places, so the information usually doesn't come from a single source. Because of this, you typically cannot trace the response back to a single parent source or know where the information came from.
   
• Bing Chat and Google Bard AI chatbots have real-time access to the Internet and use AI to transform a question into a set of queries used to search the Internet, and then generate a text-based response based on the information that it finds. Bing Chat and Google Bard will return Internet search results along with the chat response, and in some cases will provide links to the sources used to create the chat response.

How current is the information?

When using any of the generative AI chatbots for your research, it is essential to develop your fact-checking skills, including tracing claims, locating original sources, and verifying citations or 'cited' content in the generated response. Depending on the nature of the information you need to verify, you may be able to do this with Google, but when using chatbots for academic research, you may need to use library resources if the information is 'coming' from an academic journal article, for example. Always trace the claim to the original source before using it in your own work. 

See the Evaluating Online Sources guide for more information.