Guidelines

In this course, if you wish, you may use generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools as learning aids, grammar aids, or for exploratory work on your Poster Project subject area. You will not be permitted to use generative AI during the in-person written final exam and you should not use these types of tools to submit answers for Team Up! or individual written problem sets. Team Up! and written problem set questions are similar to what you can expect for large portions of the final exam and it is very important that you know how to answer these types of questions yourself.

Since generative AI is not required to complete any aspect of this course and certainly not required for an excellent grade, we strongly caution you to not rely on these tools to complete any of your coursework. Instead, if you wish, we recommend treating generative AI as a supplementary tool only for tutoring, grammar/usage improvements, or subject exploration for your Poster Project. Ultimately, you (and not any AI tool) are responsible for your own learning in this course, and for all the work you submit for credit. It is your responsibility to critically evaluate the content generated, and to regularly assess your own learning independent of generative AI tools. Overreliance on generative AI may give you a false sense of how much you’ve actually learned, which can lead to poor performance on the final exam, in later courses, or in future work or studies after graduation.

Generative AI may produce content which is incorrect or misleading, or inconsistent with the expectations of this course—this may be especially true for your Poster Project. These tools may even provide citations to sources that don’t exist—and submitting work with false citations is an academic offense. Again, please remember that you (not the generative AI) are responsible for the work that you submit in this course.

While some generative AI tools are currently available for free in Canada, please be warned that the only tool has been vetted by the University of Toronto and meets University guidelines or requirements for privacy, intellectual property, security, accessibility, and records retention is Microsoft Copilot. In addition, other generative AI tools may be subject to service interruptions, software modifications, and pricing changes during the semester. If you wish to use a generative AI tool, Microsoft CoPilot is freely available to UofT students and you should use it in Protected Mode so that your data and privacy are protected (the public version is not fully protected). You do this by going to copilot.microsoft.com and sign into your University of Toronto Microsoft 365 account by using your utorid and password. This works best in the Edge browser.

For more information, check out the following links:

• Getting Started with Microsoft Copilot
• Learning to Use AI Responsibly
• Citing Generative AI Tools
• Generative AI and Copyright Considerations

Like any other tool, generative AI is not perfect. Although Copilot can provide internet links, the underlying data it’s trained on is not necessarily up to date.  Since most scientific publications are kept behind paywalls, these are also not included in AI training datasets. Because generative AI functions by statistically picking the next best word, chatbots can confidently make up answers. It can also be difficult to replicate searches or other interactions as AI behaviour tends to drift over time.

For a great primer on how generative AI works and some of its limitations, check out the National Centre for AI's Generative AI Primer.

AI can be a helpful starting point for your research, but use it with caution. Exercise your best judgement when reviewing the results. If you use AI to help you find articles or websites for your poster project, here are three important things to keep in mind:

1. Click the link! Not all citations that Copilot provides are real. Sometimes the link leads to a real article, but not the one Copilot has cited. Make sure you click through to check out the source for yourself, and don’t simply trust an AI summary.

2. Think critically about the source of the information. Copilot might give a peer-reviewed Nature article and a blog post by a non-scientist the same weight in its response. For some tips about how to evaluate online sources, check out Evaluating Information From the Web. To brush up on the difference between scholarly articles and popular sources, refer to What is a Journal Article. You can learn more about peer review here.

3. Don’t forget the U of T Library resources! Even AI tools designed to search databases of scientific literature don't license as much content as U of T does. If Copilot provides a citation for an article behind a paywall, try finding it on LibrarySearch. Once you've narrowed down your topic, try searching the Biology subject databases for scholarly and scientific sources. You should never pay for articles while a student at U of T, and you don’t need to rely on just the abstract. If we don’t have the article, we can find it for you through Interlibrary Loan.

You can interact with AI chatbots like Copilot using natural language, just like talking to a human, but you will get more useful results if you are strategic with your prompts. Make sure your prompt includes your goal (what you need it to do) as well as any context that might help it to produce a useful answer.

Here are a few tips to improve your AI prompts:

1. Be clear. State your question or request as specifically as possible. Avoid ambiguity, as this can lead to unpredictable responses.

2. Provide context. Use keywords related to your topic and include background information to help the AI understand the request and why you're asking it. If possible, provide examples to guide the AI to responses that align with your request.

3. Say what kind of output you want. You may want a paragraph summarizing a topic, a series of numbered practice questions, bullet points of brainstormed ideas, etc., so be sure to specify this.

4. Experiment. Vary your prompts to find the most effective way to communicate your request. Review the outputs and adjust your follow-ups to get more precise answers.

For an introduction to thinking about the best ways to prompt an AI to get the results you need, check out Ethan Mollick's Working with AI: Two Paths to Prompting.

AI as a Tutor

When using AI as a learning tool, it can help to give the AI a role. For example, you might ask it to act as a tutor guiding you through an introductory biology course. Here is an example prompting script you could adapt for this purpose:

"You are a skilled and encouraging tutor. I am a (level) student in a course on (course topic). Right now we are learning about (general topic). (this establishes the role of the AI in your following interaction)

Follow-up prompts (use one at a time):

• Please explain (smaller sub topic or subheading in a text) to me in detail. Use analogies, examples, stories, and other tactics that will make the concept easier for me to learn and remember. Start out by telling me a little about why learning this information might be important. 

• I understand most of this, but tell me more about…

• Let me explain this in my own words and you tell me if I am on the right track or not. Here’s my explanation…

• Ask me some simple questions to see if I’ve got the basic ideas, and then give me feedback on my answers. 

• Ask me some moderately difficult questions to see if I can apply what I’ve learned, and then give me feedback on my answers. 

• Ask me some higher-order questions based on what I’ve learned here, and then give me feedback on my answers. 

• Explain what I need to do next to help me move this information into long-term memory."

(Tutor prompting script from Cynthia Alby’s AI Prompts for Teaching)

If you wish to learn more about effective prompting, here are a few links to get you started:

• Ethan Mollick's prompting tips include explanations of why certain tricks help: A Guide to Prompting AI (for what it's worth)

• DAIR.AI's Prompt Engineering Guide