Consensus: An AI Tool Meant to Assist Individuals with Research

What is Consensus?

Consensus is an an AI-powered academic search engine that uses artificial intelligence to aggregate and distill insights from scientific research.

How can I use Consensus?

Consensus has many uses, including:

• Simplifying Research: Using prompts, users of Consensus can search digital databases for information on an assortment of topics.
• Summarization: Consensus can summarize text, reports, or research.
• Locating Key Concepts: Consensus can locate and extract key concepts from research papers. This capability ensures that users can focus on the most essential information without having to sift through a plethora of data manually.
• Streamlining the Creation of Citations: Consensus allows users to create content drafts that include citations from studies, saving them time and effort.

Watch the following video to learn more about the uses and applications of Consensus:

Why should I take care when using Consensus?

While generative AI tools like Consensus can help users with such tasks as locating research articles, organizing existing information, mapping out scholarly discussions, or summarizing sources, the outputs they provide are not always entirely factual or grounded in the best research strategies. To the contrary, Consensus has been known to hallucinate, or "describe false information created by the AI system to defend its statements." Oftentimes, Consensus will generate outputs without qualifying the accuracy of the information it provides, and it has been known to confidently provide responses to queries that nonetheless consist of partially or fully fabricated citations or facts.

Additionally, generative AI tools like Consensus sometimes will provide outputs that lack currency, as some of the large language models that they are trained on lack access to the latest research in a given field of study. In some instances, the information that Consensus will consult to provide a summary of extant research will be based on old datasets, thereby causing it to frame the information it shares as current when, in reality, it is not.

The use of generative AI tools like Consensus in academia has also raised many concerns about academic integrity and the respect of intellectual property. One area of academic integrity affected by generative AI tools like Consensus is that of false citations.

Providing false citations in research, whether one intends to or not, is a violation of St. Catherine University's academic integrity policy. Generative AI tools such as Consensus have been known to generate false citations, and even if the citations are based on actual papers, the cited content in Consensus might still be inaccurate, placing the onus of interrogating the accuracy of it on the user of the AI tool.

Where can I find more information about Consensus?

For more information on Consensus, please refer to the FAQ page for the generative AI tool.

Last updated December 4, 2024

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