Monday, October 21, 2024

Citation Needed: AI Tools that Provide Sources

Although artificial intelligence can be a great benefit for educators and students, there are also valid concerns that schools need to consider and address (see https://bit.ly/curts-aimisuse for more details).

One of those concerns is the possibility for AI to produce content that is incorrect. In short, AI can make mistakes.

When discussing this with schools, I usually recommend several ideas to help address this concern:
  • Educate students on the potential for misinformation
  • Encourage critical thinking and skepticism among students
  • Use multiple chat tools to get a variety of responses
  • Improve the initial prompt to get more accurate responses
  • Ask follow-up questions to expand information and perspectives
  • Use tools that help check and verify information
For this blog post I am going to take a closer look at the final suggestion listed above - "Use tools that help check and verify information". Thankfully there are many AI tools that assist with fact checking or can provide sources you can use to learn more and verify the information.

See below for details on five suggested AI tools and how they can be used to help address potential inaccuracies. I have also included details for the free versions of each of these tools. 

Be sure to explore all of my AI resources at https://www.controlaltachieve.com/ai and as always I would love to hear your ideas, recommendations, and questions.

✨ Gemini Double-Check

One thing that distinguishes Gemini from many other AI chatbots is the "Double-Check" tool it offers. This feature runs a Google Search to fact check each statement made by Gemini. Here's how it works:
  • After Gemini provides a response to your prompt, you can click the Google icon below the response to launch the "Double Check".
  • Gemini will then highlight each sentence of its response based on what the Google Search determines as follows:
    • Green highlight: Google Search found content that’s likely similar to the statement. A link is provided, but it’s not necessarily what the Gemini app used to generate its response.
    • Orange highlight: Google Search found content that’s likely different from the statement, or it didn’t find relevant content. A link is provided, if available.
    • No highlight: There’s not enough information to evaluate these statements, or they aren’t intended to convey factual information.
  • For each highlighted statement, you can click on the statement to see related content from a website, along with a link to that website.
  • You can click on the link to visit the site yourself to do further research if you want.


Free Version:
  • Uses Google's 1.5 Flash model
  • Allows for unlimited chats per day.

🤔 Perplexity

Perplexity is a hybrid tool that is part AI chatbot and part web search. By combining these two together, Perplexity can generate helpful content, while also providing sources to verify the information. Here's how it works:
  • You can prompt Perplexity much like any other AI chatbot.
  • In addition to its generated response, Perplexity will also provide a list of clickable sources that are relevant to the content.
  • Also Perplexity will provide inline citations for the content it generates.
  • Simply hover over the inline citations to see the related site.
  • You can also click on the citation to visit the website and do more research yourself.


Example: You can see the results from my test with Perplexity here: Perplexity example

Free Version:
  • Unlimited Quick searches
  • 5 Pro Searches per day
  • Standard Perplexity AI Model optimized for speed and quality
  • Create a profile to personalize your answers

🤝 Consensus

Consensus is an academic search engine with access to over 200 million papers, which also uses AI to analyze the papers relevant to your prompt. The answers provided by Consensus always cite the supporting research. Here's how is works:
  • Begin by prompting Consensus with your question just like a typical AI chatbot.
  • Consensus will then search for academic papers that address your question, and analyze those papers with AI.
  • Consensus will then provide you with a summary based on those papers to answer your question, along with citations to the papers analyzed.
  • Note: If you ask a "Yes/No" question, Consensus will also generate the "Consensus Meter" to show how each analyzed paper responds to the question.
  • Below the summary, the papers are also listed with a brief summary.
  • If you click on a summary you can access the abstract for that paper, as well as a link to read the full paper yourself if you want.



Example: You can see the results from my test with Consensus here - Consensus example

Free Version:
  • 10 GPT-4 powered Pro Analyses per month
  • 10 Study Snapshots per month
  • 10 Ask Paper messages per month
  • 10 bookmarks and 1 custom list
  • Unlimited searches across over 200M research papers
  • Unlimited research quality indicators

🌩️ STORM

STORM is an AI tool from Stanford University that writes Wikipedia-style articles based on Internet research.
  • Based on the prompt you provide, the system conducts Internet-based research to collect references and generates an outline.
  • STORM then uses the outline and references to generate the full-length article with citations.
To improve the quality of the article it create, STORM uses two strategies:
  • Perspective-Guided Question Asking: Given the input topic, STORM discovers different perspectives by surveying existing articles from similar topics and uses them to control the question-asking process.
  • Simulated Conversation: STORM simulates a conversation between a Wikipedia writer and a topic expert grounded in Internet sources to enable the language model to update its understanding of the topic and ask follow-up questions.
Here's how you use it:
  • From the STORM website, type in the topic you want to research.
  • Below that there will be a box where you will be asked to type in your motivation and what you hope to achieve with your topic. This will help provide additional direction for the AI.
  • STORM will then generate the article, which may take several minutes.
  • The completed article will include inline citations for the research papers and reference sites the content was based on.
  • Additionally, you can click a link to "See the BrainSTORMing Process" which will show you details on the simulated conversations the AI had to conduct its research from multiple perspectives.


Example: You can see the results from my test with STORM here: STORM example

Free Version:
  • STORM appears to be free for use.

❓ Elicit

Elicit is similar to many of these tools as it also analyzes relevant peer reviewed articles. Here's how it works:
  • Type in the question you are exploring.
  • Elicit will then gather and analyze a wide variety of academic papers related to your question.
  • Elicit will generate a summary of the top four papers, explaining what they have to say about your question.
  • The summary will include links to each of the cited papers, where you can get a much more detailed summary of each paper as related to your question.
  • Elicit will also list additional research papers in a table that you can explore as desired.


Example: You can see the results from my test with Elicit here (Note: You will need a free account to view the page) - Elicit example

Free Version:
  • Unlimited search across more than 125 million papers
  • Unlimited summaries of 4 papers at once
  • Unlimited chat with 4 papers at once
  • Extract data from 10 uploaded PDFs per month
  • Add 2 columns to your tables at a time
  • View sources for answers
  • Import from Zotero


Post by Eric Curts
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