Five Ways to Use AI the Right Way in Academia (From a Former Psychology Professor) 

While having AI write your paper is a definite no-no, AI can still provide valuable assistance. Here are 5 ways to take advantage of AI to make your life easier and improve the quality of your work: 

Summarizing information using AI 

One of the great strengths of AI is its ability to summarize information. Learning to read academic papers is a skill that students need to develop. Because AI can summarize papers to varying—and adjustable—degrees of detail, AI can help you quickly identify key ideas and useful content so you can focus on the papers that matter to your work. 

Fixing the tone of your article using AI 

Authors sometimes have trouble adopting the appropriate tone and style for an academic paper. AI can help identify where a paper may be too informal, or veer too heavily into Old High Academese, more colloquially known as overly verbose and stilted writing. Since much academic writing is in the third person, AI can verify that a writer hasn’t slipped into first or second person. If a particular publication has specific rules around style or formatting, AI can check to make sure you’re matching those as well. 

Using AI to detect Plagiarism 

Inadvertent plagiarism is a persistent problem. Some students don’t always understand the rules, sometimes they forget to cite material, and so forth. AI can identify plagiarized passages so the paper can be corrected. It’s much less embarrassing to have an AI catch the error than your professor or, worse yet, the readers of the journal that published your paper. 

Verifying citations  

Even though there are many citation managers available today, keeping track of citations and references can still be a pain. AI can scan through your paper and give you back a list of citations. You can then check that list against your references to make sure you didn’t miss anything. Depending on the AI models available, AI may also be able to verify that your citations are formatted correctly for your choice of citation style and that your citations and references match (full disclosure, occasionally this generated some very odd results).  

Finding relevant papers and sources of Information using AI 

Search is the real measure of AI—an AI system that can’t do search is of limited use because virtually everything we do requires information. Finding relevant papers for a literature review is always time-consuming and often frustrating. But AI infrastructure software that enables AI-enhanced search or metasearch (for example, a product such as SWIRL) makes AI useful here too. You can query in natural language and the infrastructure software will use AI to sort through the results and rank the papers by relevance to your initial query. AI infrastructure software that uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds results in facts, so you know you’re getting back real information, not hallucinations.  

Artificial intelligence is not going to write a paper for you, at least not a good one. That task requires real intelligence. But AI can help save you time and frustration by taking on routine, time-consuming tasks so you can focus on the actual content of the paper.  

Ultimately, the real value of AI for most of us is not all the flashy haiku generation or even fraud detection, but rather the ability of AI to help us find what we need when we need it, and to remove the obstacles and distractions that prevent us from doing our best work.