The art of using your (artificial) intelligence wisely

So-called “generative” artificial intelligence creates text by statistical prediction from masses of data on the Internet. Although many of the answers produced by AI are accurate, they can also often be erroneous or biased information. Oftentimes, the answers produced by GenAI will be a mixture of truth and fiction. If you are using GenAI-generated text for your academic works, in compliance with the instructions given by your teacher, it will be important to be able to verify its outputs. 

But how are you going to assess the validity of what GenAI is telling you? There is a simple and effective method: lateral reading. This method is a fact-checking technique that involves distancing oneself from the factual production of an AI by consulting several other credible, non-AI-generated sources.

You can think of this as “tabbed reading”: instead of continuing to follow the AI's suggestions by scrolling vertically down a page, you open new tabs, laterally, to check this information with other sources.

Here's how to fact-check something you got from a GenAI tool:
1.	Break down the information. Take a look at the response and see if you can isolate specific, searchable claims. This is called fractionation.
2.	Then it’s lateral reading time! Open a new tab and look for supporting pieces of information in reliable sources. At the same time, always check if the GenAI isn’t putting correct information, but in the wrong context. For example, is it attributing a fake article to a real author?
3.	Next, think deeper about what assumptions are being made here
	a.	What did your prompt assume?
	b.	What did the GenAI assume?
	c.	Who might have expertise or a different opinion on the subject?
4.	Make a judgment call. What here is true, what is misleading, and what is factually incorrect?
5.	Remember, you’re repeating this process for each of the claims the GenAI made – go back to your list from the first step and keep going!

Always keep in mind that critical thinking about AI responses goes beyond determining whether the specific facts in the text are true or false. When we critically think about news articles, books, or social media posts out in the wild, we think about the author’s viewpoint because it necessarily influences the content of the text. These texts that all of us produce every day are the foundation of generative AI’s training data. While AI text generators don’t have their own opinions, they inevitably reflect human biases, opinions or points of view. These influences may therefore surface in their answers, and you are urged to constantly remain vigilant and critical.