Research Guides: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Students: Examples of AI Tools

Live Help

Note

New AI tools are released almost every day. Here are some tools to learn about new AI tools:

There's An AI For That
Generative AI Product Tracker
Curated by Ithaka S+R

Please note that this guide is meant to be a tool to point you in the direction of possible AI tools that you might want to test, explore, and play with. The TRU Library does not support or endorse any of the AI tools mentioned in this guide.

Note: As of October2024, no generative AI tools have undergone a Privacy Impact Assessment at TRU, which means that no personal or personally identifiable information copyrighted, proprietary, TRU Internal Use or Confidential information, or student work should be shared with these systems, and they cannot be required for use in TRU courses.

AI Tools

ChatGPT (OpenAI)
An artificial intelligence large language model that can engage in conversational interactions and provide responses to a wide range of queries. May be useful for brainstorming, summarization, editing, and coding.
Claude (Anthropic)
Family of large language models developed by Anthropic.
Copilot (Microsoft)
Formerly known as Bing Chat AI. Product by Microsoft. Use is limited without a Microsoft account. Is available for free for all TRU faculty, students, and staff. Log in using your TRU network credentials.
Gemini (Google)
Formerly known as Bard. In addition to understanding and generating text like other LLMs, Gemini can also understand, operate on, and combine other kinds of information including images, audio, videos, and code.
DuckDuckGo AI Chat
Allows “anonymous access to popular AI models, including GPT-4o mini, Claude 3, and open-source Llama 3.1 and Mixtral.”

Grammarly
Has moved beyond being a simple spelling and grammar check tool to becoming a writing assistant that provides formatting, rewriting, and sentence structure help. May be useful because it explains why you need to change something.
Paragraph AI
Generative writing assistant that allows users to stipulate a tone and designate an audience for their writing and to make revisions.
Accessible as a browser extension or a mobile app.
QuillBot
Writing, summarizing, and paraphrasing tool.
Wordtune
Reading and writing companion that says it understands what you’re trying to say and suggests ways to make your writing more clear, compelling and authentic. Claims to cover every aspect of content writing - from correcting grammatical errors to improving the written content.

Explainpaper
Meant to help readers understand complex academic papers. Allows readers to upload a paper, highlight any confusing text, and then the system explains the highlighted text.
Humata AI
Document analysis tool that quickly reads uploaded text, absorb the contents, and answer any questions you may have on the contents. There is a free version, but also paid models for more capacity.
QuestionWall
AI question generator. Input a topic or upload a reading to have the system create a question bank, including multiple choice, fill in the blank, and short answer questions.
GoblinTools
Collection of small, simple, single-task tools, mostly designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult. Tools include "The Judge" to help you assess the tone of a message, "The Chef" to find recipes based on ingredients/dietary constraint, "The Estimator" to estimate how long tasks would take to help with time management, "The Formalizer" to convert the tone of language into more/less formal, and "Magic ToDo" which uses AI to auto-generate task lists.

Consensus
Searches and summarizes academic articles. Includes a "consensus meter" for yes/no questions to determine tone of summarized articles
Elicit
Created by Ought, a San Francisco nonprofit organization. Automates literature reviews by synthesizing evidence and arguments within the literature. Elicit may miss the nuance of a paper. Summarizes, not evaluates articles, so will not pick up cases of academic fraud or questionable methodology. Works best for empirical research.
Inciteful
System includes two tools. Paper Discovery builds a network of papers from citations and uses network analysis algorithms to analyze the network to identify the most similar papers, important papers, prolific authors and key institutions. Literature Connector allows you to enter two papers and provides an interactive visualization showing how they are connected by the literature.
Litmaps
Tool for literature reviews that locates articles relevant to your search criteria and displays them in visual maps to show connections.
Perplexity
AI powered research engine that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Generates answers using sources from the web and cites links within the text response.
ResearchRabbit
Online citation-based literature mapping tool to optimize your time spent searching for references. Using one or more "seed" papers to start your research, the app will find more papers relevant to your topic based on those "seed" papers.
Scholarcy
Summarizes research articles, creates interactive flashcards, highlights key points, and links to open-access versions of each citation
Semantic Scholar
Free, AI-driven search and discovery tool for the sciences (e.g., computer science, geoscience neuroscience, and biomedical science). Much of the content is open access, although some may require use of the TRU Library's subscribed resources or interlibrary loan service to obtain the full text.

NOTE: AI detectors are far from perfect and have very high false positive and false negative rates. They may incorrectly flag legitimate student work as having been written by AI or fail to detect work that was generated by AI. It is particularly prone to having false positives for text written by people that aren't writing in their first language. Relying on AI detectors without human judgement can lead to unfair assessments.

None of the detectors listed below have undergone a TRU Privacy Impact Assessment; there may be privacy and security concerns with submitting student work to them, particularly without their knowledge or consent.

AI Image Detectors