Imagine you're taking a test that requires you to solve mathematical questions. A calculator is a tool that would be appropriate to use, as it helps to apply mathematical equations more efficiently to answer test questions. But would it be appropriate to use a calculator when writing an essay on the French Revolution?
When people are using generative AI tools to create content, there needs to be a purpose behind using these tools. Such as generating questions to investigate a particular topic.
Then critical thinking and evaluation needs to be applied to the content that is produced.
GenAI can be an assistant or helper in finding information or generating work, but it does not replace your work. Generated information or synthetic work must always be double-checked.
If you need recent information on a world event or a new development in research, some generative AI tools may not have that information in their datasets. In April 2025, when prompted about how recent its training data is, ChatGPT (GPT-4o mini) responded that it had data up to January 2023. GenAI such as ChatGPT will lean heavily on its semantic searching techniques, wherein it uses its dataset (that has a certain end-date for its data), and avoid searching the Internet for information. Internet searching takes more processing power (and therefore money) to perform.
When you initially encounter a source of information and start to read it—stop. Ask yourself whether you know and trust the author, publisher, publication, or website. If you don’t, use the other fact-checking moves that follow, to get a better sense of what you’re looking at. In other words, don’t read, share, or use the source in your research until you know what it is, and you can verify it is reliable.
You don’t have to do a three-hour investigation into a source before you engage with it. But if you’re reading a piece on economics, and the author is a Nobel prize-winning economist, that would be useful information. Likewise, if you’re watching a video on the many benefits of milk consumption, you would want to be aware if the video was produced by the dairy industry. This doesn’t mean the Nobel economist will always be right and that the dairy industry can’t ever be trusted. But knowing the expertise and agenda of the person who created the source is crucial to your interpretation of the information provided.
What if the source you find is low-quality, or you can’t determine if it is reliable or not? Perhaps you don’t really care about the source—you care about the claim that source is making. You want to know if it is true or false. You want to know if it represents a consensus viewpoint, or if it is the subject of much disagreement. A common example of this is a meme you might encounter on social media. The random person or group who posted the meme may be less important than the quote or claim the meme makes.
Much of what we find on the internet has been stripped of context. Maybe there’s a video of a fight between two people with Person A as the aggressor. But what happened before that? What was clipped out of the video and what stayed in? Maybe there’s a picture that seems real but the caption could be misleading. Maybe a claim is made about a new medical treatment based on a research finding—but you’re not certain if the cited research paper actually said that. The people who re-report these stories either get things wrong by mistake, or, in some cases, they are intentionally misleading us.