Open Educational Resources (OER) and Zero Textbook Cost (ZTC)

Disclaimer

Due to Generative AI's notoriety for producing false information and the exploitative labor that goes behind it, we strongly recommend contacting the ZTC librarian with your query instead for the most accurate and ethically-sourced results.

While AI can be a convenient tool, we discourage you from using it as your sole method of finding educational content. It is best used as either a preliminary research tool, or a way to summarize/reformat information you've already found and verified.

Why?

• Generative AI tools are known to produce false or nonexistent citations.
• AI tools usually pull up the most popular books in your discipline, rather than the highest quality titles.
• When asked to provide the feedback on a resource, AI tends to only highlight the positive feedback.

Image by JoyPixels via Createzilla, CC BY 4.0.

Bias and Misinformation in AI

You must account for possible biases that your AI model will produce. The AI model might only feature the most popular sources that have the most reviews, or generate inaccurate results if the prompt is not clear. Generative AI has been known to produce bias and sources that don't exist (aka "hallucinations"), so you should always fact check and verify the source links it produces. Keep in mind that fact-checking may take more time and effort than just starting your search in a more reputable search engine like Google Scholar or an OER repository.

What Causes AI Bias?

Generative AI systems can produce inaccurate and biased content for several reasons:

• Training Data Sources: Generative AI models are trained on vast amounts of internet data. This data, while rich in information, contains both accurate and inaccurate content, as well as societal and cultural biases. Since these models mimic patterns in their training data without discerning truth, they can reproduce any falsehoods or biases present in that data (Weise & Metz, 2023).
• Limitations of Generative Models: Generative AI models function like advanced autocomplete tools: They’re designed to predict the next word or sequence based on observed patterns. Their goal is to generate plausible content, not to verify its truth. That means any accuracy in their outputs is often coincidental. As a result, they might produce content that sounds reasonable but is inaccurate (O’Brien, 2023).
• Inherent Challenges in AI Design: The technology behind generative AI tools isn’t designed to differentiate between what’s true and what’s not true. Even if generative AI models were trained solely on accurate data, their generative nature would mean they could still produce new, potentially inaccurate content by combining patterns in unexpected ways (Weise & Metz, 2023).

Read More

AI Tools for Research

Use these AI tools to search and compare peer-reviewed academic research.

AI Tools for Summarization

These tools can help you discover and/or summarize web pages, including OERs. 

Adapted and modified from  AI Literacy in the Age of ChatGPT: Which AI tool for your task? and Ethics of AI for Researchers by University of Arizona Libraries, © 2024 The Arizona Board of Regents on behalf of The University of Arizona, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.