At Lancaster University there are two Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that you can make use of: Microsoft Copilot Chat and SAIL. While these tools can be great for boosting your productivity, artificial intelligence is no substitute for your own brain, and you will get the best results from these tools by ensuring you are using them effectively and safely.
Plan out your prompts to get the best output
You may have heard the term "prompt engineering" before. What this actually means is considering important things to include within the prompts you send to AI in order to get the best output, and can include things like setting the tone for the response (e.g. Formal, Marketing), choosing a target audience (e.g. current students, researchers, school leavers) and giving the AI a role to begin with ("You are a graphic designer").
A good starting method for this is the CRAFT framework: "Create, Refine, Add, Feedback, Tweak" which you can learn more about in the AI Fundamentals online course.
Keep it consistent
When working with AI tools such as Microsoft Copilot Chat, you can set some customisation and personalisation options - for example you can tell the tool to remember how you want your outputs formatted, e.g. "Remember I like my results in bullet points".
The more you personalise your tool, the more consistent your outputs will be. For example, if generating marketing materials, you could personalise the tool to include University colours, to maintain brand consistency.
Promote accessibility and inclusivity
Not only can AI tools be a great assistive technology, helping to break tasks down into more manageable plans, or analysing and changing the tone or written text (e.g. "make this email sound more friendly/professional/positive"), but AI tools can also be used proactively to improve the accessibility of your content.
You could use AI tools such as Copilot Chat to improve the colour contrast of a page, to automatically add a heading structure to your documents so they can be easily browsed by those using keyboard shortcuts, or to suggest Alt Text descriptions of images for visually impaired users.
Keep your data secure
When working with AI tools, you should only ever be using Ordinary classifications of data, by which we mean the sorts of information that would be publicly available on websites. In some AI tools you will have the option to upload documents or spreadsheets for the AI to analyse, summarise or edit, and it's important that you're not uploading any confidential, restricted or personal data into that tool, so ensure you have taken all the steps to properly anonymise any data that you have before giving it to the AI tool.
Be aware that sometimes simply removing a name is not enough to anonymise the data, for example if you remove the name 'Lydia Fazakerley' from the data, but leave the job title 'Digital Fluency Manager', it would be very easy to search google for 'Lancaster University Digital Fluency Manager' and find the person.
Consider sustainability
Did you know that the average ChatGPT query has a carbon footprint 340x higher than an equivalent Google search? Asking ChatGPT just one thing every day over the course of a year is the energy equivalent of powering a second laptop. The cost of using AI often gets overlooked, but tools such as ChatGPT are incredibly resource hungry. Sustainable use of them is an important aspect of maintaining a healthy digital carbon footprint.