Research

LLMs can quickly give you an overview of a topic and suggest areas worth exploring.

They are great at summarising information in plain language helping you understand a topic before you dive into the real sources.

As you saw in Lesson 3, LLMs can make up citations that look completely real. Always use Trusted Sources to verify information.

A good approach is to use AI to build your understanding first and then use the real sources to write it in your own words.

A researcher fed Microsoft Copilot a dataset about expressing emotions where the responses from US and UK participants were completely identical, word for word, the same data.

When asked to find differences between the two groups, Copilot confidently produced a detailed summary claiming Americans and British people expressed emotions differently in tone and wording style.

Copilot invented differences between them based on stereotypes it had learnt during training.

The AI doesn't always tell you when it has nothing real to say, so always verify summaries against a trusted source.