Artificial Intelligence (AI) Help Guide

Lateral reading is a strategy for fact-checking and evaluating sources, including generative AI responses. Lateral reading involves leaving the AI tool to consult other online sources. Instead of relying on an AI tool as your only source for information, try opening up new tabs to verify facts, identify gaps, and find alternative perspectives.

Below are steps you can follow to fact-check information from AI tools.

1. Break down the information in the AI's response. Identify specific facts or claims made by the AI that you can search online and compare with other sources.
2. Open a new tab (or multiple!) to search for more information to support the AI's response.
   • Use Google and sites like Wikipedia or Encyclopedia Britannica to search for specific pieces of information included in the AI's response.
   • Use UDC Search and Google Scholar to verify if sources cited by the AI are real and relevant to the AI's response.
3. Reflect on the assumptions made.
   • What did your prompt assume?
   • What did the AI assume?
   • Who would know things about this topic? Would they have a different perspective than what the AI offers? Where could you check to find out?
4. Make a judgment call.
   • Decide what is true, what is misleading, and what is false.
   • Can you re-prompt the AI to try and fix some of its errors?
   • Can you dive deeper into some of the sources you found while fact-checking?

Lateral reading suggestions adapted from "AI and Information Literacy: Assessing Content" by the University of Maryland Libraries and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

Watch this video from UDC Library for an example of how you can use lateral reading strategies to fact-check AI-generated text and links.

The ROBOT Test is another strategy for evaluating AI-generated content, generative AI tools, and other sources and texts about AI.

Investigate these questions when assessing content generated by an AI model.

Reliability

• How reliable is the information available about the AI technology?
• If it’s not produced by the party responsible for the AI, what are the author’s credentials?
• If it is produced by the party responsible for the AI, how much information are they making available? 
• Is information only partially available due to trade secrets?

Objective

• What is the goal or objective of the use of the AI technology?
• What is the goal of sharing information about it?
  • To inform?
  • To convince?
  • To find financial support?

Bias

• What could create bias in the AI technology?
• Are bias or other ethical issues acknowledged?
  • By the source of information?
  • By the party responsible for the AI?
  • By its users?

Owner

• Who is the owner or developer of the AI technology?
• Who is responsible for it?
  • Is it a private company?
  • The government?
  • A think tank or research group?
• Who has access to it?
• Who can use it?

Type

• Which subtype of AI is it?
• Is the technology theoretical or applied?
• What kind of information system does it rely on?
• Does it rely on human intervention? 

The ROBOT Test evaluation tool by S. Hervieux and A. Wheatley (for The LibrAIry) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Presented by Tricia Clarke, Community College Engagement Librarian at UDC Library, on February 28, 2025.

Generative AI tools are powerful but also imperfect. They can generate inaccurate or misleading information, and they are trained using data that may contain inherent biases. It is important to fact-check and evaluate AI-generated content. In this session, we walk you through the common problems that show up in AI, tips to review your results, and tests you can use to evaluate gen AI creations.