Glossary

Category: Ethics & Integrity

The commitment to honest and ethical conduct in academic work, including proper attribution of sources and original thinking. AI use must align with ECU’s honor code and course-specific policies.

Category: Using AI Effectively

A type of AI tool that can complete sequences of tasks or decisions beyond the chat window. A chatbot can make a list of restaurants; an agent can make a reservation.

Category: Ethics & Integrity

Software designed to identify whether content was generated by AI. These tools have varying accuracy rates and can produce false positives.

Category: Ethics & Integrity

The practice of transparently stating when and how AI was used in creating academic work, research, or professional communications.

Category: Ethics & Integrity

Large language models confidently generate information that is false, fabricated, or nonsensical, including fake citations or made-up data. Always verify AI outputs.

Category: Using AI Effectively

The ability to understand, use, evaluate, and think critically about AI technologies, including their capabilities, limitations, and societal impacts.

Category: Core AI Concepts

A set of rules and instructions that an AI system follows to solve problems, make decisions, or complete tasks.

Category: Ethics & Integrity

Systematic, unwanted unfairness in AI outputs based on characteristics like race, gender, age, or disability, often stemming from biased training data.

Category: Core AI Concepts

Machine-based systems designed to perform tasks that mimic some human intelligence, such as learning, problem-solving, and decision-making.

Category: Core AI Concepts

An AI-powered conversational interface that can respond to user questions and requests in natural language.

Category: AI Tools & Platforms

An AI assistant developed by OpenAI that uses GPT models to engage in conversation, answer questions, and assist with tasks.

Category: AI Tools & Platforms

An AI assistant created by Anthropic capable of engaging in conversation, answering questions, and assisting with various tasks.

Category: Using AI Effectively

An AI capability where the system takes more time to “think through” complex problems step-by-step before answering, similar to how humans work through difficult questions.

Category: Ethics & Integrity

Suggested new entry — confirm before publishing.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act protects student education records. At ECU this maps to Level 2 protected institutional data, the sensitivity tier that determines which AI tools, like Microsoft Copilot Chat, are approved for use with that information.

Category: AI Tools & Platforms

Google’s AI assistant and large language model, capable of processing text, images, and other forms of data.

Category: Core AI Concepts

A type of artificial intelligence that creates new content (text, images, video, code, audio) by analyzing patterns from large datasets. Examples include Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Category: Core AI Concepts

The distinctly human capacity to learn and apply that learning, to think, reason, judge, and decide, developed through lived experience and responsibility, not automatic like AI.

Category: Core AI Concepts

A type of AI model trained on massive amounts of data that can generate and manipulate human language. Implementations include ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot.

Category: Core AI Concepts

A subset of AI that enables computers to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed, by identifying patterns in data.

Category: AI Tools & Platforms

ECU’s primary approved generative AI tool, integrated with Microsoft 365 and single sign-on. Approved for use with Level 2 protected institutional data, the recommended tool for most faculty, staff, and student AI use at ECU.

Category: Core AI Concepts

The AI system created through the training process that has learned to make predictions or generate content based on patterns in the training data.

Category: Core AI Concepts

AI systems that can understand and generate multiple types of content, text, images, audio, video, and make connections between them.

Category: Core AI Concepts

The branch of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language in meaningful, useful ways.

Category: Core AI Concepts

A computational model inspired by the human brain, made of interconnected layers of artificial “neurons” that learn to recognize patterns.

Category: AI Tools & Platforms

Google’s AI-powered research and note-taking tool that can analyze and summarize documents, helping organize information and generate insights.

Category: Using AI Effectively

The text input, question, or instruction given to a generative AI system to guide its response. Good prompts are clear, specific, contextual, accurate, and ethical.

Category: Using AI Effectively

The practice of carefully crafting prompts to get better, more accurate, or more useful responses from AI systems.

Category: Using AI Effectively

A technique that enhances AI responses by first retrieving relevant information from a specific source, then using it to generate an answer, can reduce hallucinations.

Category: Using AI Effectively

The practice of connecting AI-generated responses directly to specific source materials, allowing users to verify where information came from.

Category: Core AI Concepts

Suggested new entry — confirm before publishing.

The process of breaking text into small chunks (tokens), pieces of words, whole words, or punctuation, that an AI model actually reads and generates. Token limits determine how much text a model can handle in one prompt or response.

Category: Core AI Concepts

The information and examples used to teach an AI model how to perform tasks. Quality and diversity significantly affect AI outputs and can introduce bias.

Category: Using AI Effectively

A specific, practical scenario or application showing how AI can be used to accomplish a particular task or solve a problem.

Category: Using AI Effectively

The essential process of checking AI-generated information against credible, authoritative sources before using it in academic, research, or professional work.