Skills for Success / Academic Skills / How to Use Artificial Intelligence
Copilot can help you with essays, reports, presentations or any other task you might have to do at university. Here is an example of how it can help: in this case it is an essay, but the same kind of interaction can apply to most university tasks. It is important that you only use the protected version of Copilot which is provided by LSBU.
**LSBU has paid for a protected version of Copilot and students should only use that - so make sure you have logged in to your LSBU student account. Do not upload assignment briefs, or anything else that could be someone's intellectual property, to free versions of AI.**
Mo has an assignment where he has to write an essay. The essay question is "Discuss the impact of social media on the mental health of teenagers."
Mo logs in to LSBU's protected version of Copilot and uploads the assignment brief. He asks Copilot:
"Identify the main objectives, word count, and submission date from the assignment brief."
Copilot gives him these. Now Mo wants to make sure he understands the assignment question, so he asks:
"What are the key words in this assignment?"
Copilot answers:
"The key words are: 'discuss', 'impact', 'mental health', 'teenagers' and 'social media'."
Mo wants to make sure about the definitions of some of the words:
"Explain what is meant by 'discuss', 'mental health' and 'social media' in the context of this essay."
Copilot explains these.
Mo doesn't really know how to structure an academic discussion essay, so he asks:
"Can you tell me the basic structure of an academic discussion essay?"
Copilot gives him this.
Now that he has an idea of what he has to do, he asks Copilot:
"Outline a timeline for completing the research, writing, and editing phases of this essay."
Copilot suggests a schedule, and Mo thinks it will be useful. It looks like quite a lot of time will be needed for doing research in the academic literature. Mo is not confident about searching for sources, or how to begin, so he asks Copilot:
"Search for recent studies on the impact of social media on teenagers' mental health."
Copilot gives Mo three links to articles. Mo has a look at the first one, but it is quite hard, so he asks Copilot:
"Can you summarise the main points of this article so that I can decide if it is useful for my essay?"
Copilot helpfully summarises the article and gives a list of the main points.
Mo thinks it looks useful. He decides to check with Copilot that it is a real article (not one invented by Copilot) and that it comes from a reliable source:
"Is this a real article from a reliable peer-reviewed source?"
Copilot confirms that it is. Mo knows that if he wants to read the article, and of course, if he wants to use it in his essay, he will need the reference so he asks Copilot:
"Can you give me the Harvard reference for this article?"
Copilot does this - with the correct formatting:
Anguyo, M., Masete, J., Akia, M., and Drasiku, H. (2023). The impact of social media on adolescent mental health. In Carotenuto, M. (ed.) Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in the 21st Century. IntechOpen. Available at: https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/1166131 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2025].
Mo will use Discovery Search to find the paper. He continues to do research and interact with Copilot. As Mo finds out more, he develops his ideas and decides on a plan for his essay. He asks Copilot to check his essay plan:
"Is this a good plan for my essay?"
Copilot gives him feedback and makes some suggestions about some things he should add and some other things he might think about removing, as well as providing the reasons why.
Mo thinks about what Copilot said and makes some changes. Then, he decides to start the first draft of his essay with the introduction. He asks Copilot:
"Can you show me an example of a well-structured introduction for an academic essay on a similar topic?"
Copilot gives him an example. This helps Mo to see what you need to do in an introduction.
Mo continues working on his essay. He finds that the whole process of interacting with Copilot is getting him more engaged and helping him to really understand the subject and all the important issues. This definitely helps him to do more analysis and critical thinking, and this is showing in his essay.
Mo follows the schedule suggested by Copilot and eventually gets to the editing and proofreading stage. C
opilot can help him with this as well by giving him suggestions about his writing. For example, it checks his academic style and suggests some ways to be more concise.
Mo realises that Copilot has really helped him make progress. However, he has also learned that you have to be a bit cautious about its answers - it can make mistakes and it sometimes invents things; it also tries to be positive and make you happy when what you really need is the simple truth. So, Mo has decided that you need to try to ask Copilot the right questions and be cautious about the answers you get.
Overall, though, he is very happy with how AI has helped him develop.
