Generative AI programs can be good for helping to understand new concepts and to generate ideas but caution should be used when considering using Generative AI  chatbots for academic research.  If you use a generative AI tool to produce information for work or school, the stakes are high. There could be real legal and employment repercussions to sharing privileged or licensed information with a generative AI program. Also, presenting AI generated information as your own could be considered academic or professional dishonesty. And whenever you use a generative AI tool, you always risk eliciting hallucinated, incorrect, or biased information. 

Here are some factors to keep in mind when considering the use of a generative AI:

• Design: Large Language Models (LLM's) are predictive models, not search engines. They are designed to predict what word is most likely to come next. Their logic is based on statistical reasoning, not subject expertise. 
• Training Data: Consider the data that your tool of choice is trained on. Most LLMs are trained on data scraped from the internet. If this is the case, even if your tool has up-to-date internet access, it is still only as good as what is freely available online.
• Sources: Some generative AI tools will give you the sources that they used to generate the answer to your question, so that you can evaluate those sources (and therefore the answer) for credibility, bias, etc. Most generative AI tools are unable to give you an explanation of how they came to any particular answer. This is due to AI systems' "black box problem", which makes it impossible to determine how an AI reached its decision. When asked to produce its sources, most generative text-based AI's will refer back to their training data.
• Terms and Conditions: We know -- no one reads the terms and conditions. But these tools are still in development, and so the norms around privacy, data protection, and content moderation are still being established. If you're considering using a generative AI tool for a course, to develop your business, or in the workplace, it is worth looking at the fine print.