Horn Library online resources are to be used for academic purposes only. Commercial use, including for an internship or job is NOT permitted. Access is granted to all current faculty, students, and staff. Copyrighted materials extracted from the library’s licensed resources may not be published, redistributed, or made available to third parties (including AI platforms) unless explicitly permitted by licensing agreements. If you have questions about whether a specific use is acceptable, please contact research@babson.edu.
Use of library resources is strictly subject to Babson's Acceptable Use Policy.
It is important to consider whether your use of a Generative AI tool is appropriate. There are real legal and employment repercussions to sharing privileged or licensed information with an Open Source AI. Passing off 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.
When you use a Generative AI Tool for any level of research, you will need to be prepared to closely evaluate the information for both bias, plagiarism, and factual accuracy.
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.
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.
Some generative AI tools will give you the links associated with the output, 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.
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.
In general: you should always be transparent about your use of AI tools. Since AI tools cannot be considered an author (established by Thaler v. Perlmutter on August 18, 2023), they should not be considered a source. Instead, they are generally considered a collaborator.
Therefore, you should cite AI tools when they are used to:
For most AI tools, you should collect the following elements for citation:
Adapted from CC BY-NC MIT Libraries
When the library subscribes to a database on behalf of the college's faculty, staff, and students, we must adhere to that resource's licensing agreements. Those licenses protect the intellectual property of that resource.
Most database vendors prevent sharing their resources with those who do not have authorized access.
Because users have very little control over how their input will or could be used by an Open Source AI platform, this also applies to inputting database content into most AI platforms.
For more information, see our Acceptable Use Statement for Library Online Resources:
"Horn Library online resources are to be used for academic purposes only. Commercial use, including for an internship or job is NOT permitted. Access is granted to all current faculty, students, and staff. Copyrighted materials extracted from the library’s licensed resources may not be published, redistributed, or made available to third parties (including AI platforms) unless explicitly permitted by licensing agreements. If you have questions about whether a specific use is acceptable, please contact research@babson.edu.
Use of library resources is strictly subject to Babson's Acceptable Use Policy."