Lot’s of people ask me as an academic if I should use AI or if I do use AI and how dangerous it is or how helpful it is and should students also use AI or stay clear of it the answer is yes AI is really useful and I use it all of the time everyday mainly for two things No. 1 I will use it to summarise something for me something I’m writing something I’m reading it will just give me the bullet points I need to understand the topic in hand very time saving secondly I will use it to shorten things for me so I’ll be writing something I could be 5 600 words over and I’ll ask AI to just shorten the thing for me and summarise what I’m writing as well as a bonus it can also search for things really really quickly and quicker than any search engine can it can be more precise in my view students can also use it for these purposes but it’s really quite easy for me now to spot when students have used AI just to write things for them because there’s a certain way it does things that you can understand pretty quick and get to know and be familiar with I wanted to share something with you that AI did recently with me that really made me think about how much I trust AI and why it’s important not to rely on it too heavily in anything you do so I was researching quite an in depth topic looking at lots of different papers reading around it trying to understand the concepts under and in hand and I asked AI to summarise a paper for me that was really complex and I just said you know can you just tell me maybe 5 key points that this paper is trying to get across bear in mind had already read the paper but this is the task I asked it to do AI came back to me and started to say oh yes this paper says this does this talks about this and recommends the following things and I thought to myself no it doesn’t it definitely doesn’t do that I’m asking you to summarize but I’ve read it and that’s not what it’s doing so I literally wrote back no he doesn’t say that the author does not say that and AI wrote back you’re absolutely correct my apologies for the error in my previous response then at the bottom of of what they said which I found really impressive they said I appreciate you pointing out the inaccuracy in my previous response it’s a good reminder of the importance to to be careful in interpretation and avoiding overstatements uh when referencing someone’s work and I couldn’t agree more you can use AI for lots of useful things but do not rely on it only rely on your brain