[Bradford] Tentative steps into AI usage

[John Robert Hudson]

Hi Paul

Not sure if this will help:

 LyX Document
 Just some general points: if you are writing an essay, it should have:
   1. An introduction
   2. Three main points backed up with evidence/quotes
   3. A conclusion.
People writing for the web often do not quote sources because they are
not academics and are writing for a lay audience who would not bother
to look at the sources anyway.
 You only need to quote page numbers if you are giving an exact quote or
referring to a specific chapter/section of a book/article. Otherwise
the author, title, publisher and year are probably enough.
 If you do quote something, do it from the original, not from someone
else’s quote or say, only as a last resort, ‘X quoting Y says …’
Otherwise, if you cannot find the original quote, summarise the point X
is making rather than quoting anything.
 For books which are not recent, you can often find details of books on
the Internet or by searching the British Library catalogue. Similarly
most journal publishers, while they will not let you read an article
without subscribing, will let you see an abstract of it and give you
all the information you need to reference it if you do not need to
quote from it or refer to a particular aspect.
 For articles published on the web, give the author, title, publication,
date and URL followed by ‘accessed on …’ saying when you actually read
it on the web. As these are usually single pages, you do not need to
give a page number when quoting from them.
 John

On Sat, 2025-01-11 at 20:41 +0000, Paul Colley via Bradford wrote:
> Hi all and happy 2025. I've been approached by a friend who is having
> to do Best Interests Assessor training in order to keep their job
> with a social services department and is struggling with the essay
> drafting. Would you be willing to comment on their recent letter to
> me and perhaps offer advice and signposting - it's not something I've
> explored beyond the most superficial of use cases. Thanks in
> anticipation. They write:
> 
> I'll also be able to share with you my a.i.  journey of navigating
> different AI essay writing tools.  It's been like trying to tame an
> unruly beast, although unruly in the sense of its default to simplify
> everything when am needing the opposite of that.  It's extremely hard
> to get them to give specific quotes in quotation marks and page
> references, even if asked explicitly, and even when claiming to have
> access to journal data bases (in the way that Chat GPT/Gemini don't).
> I am prepared to pay a subscription but the best one I found (Samwell
> a.i) only allows a year subscription of about £100 min and that still
> doesn't do quotes.
> 
> (am not planning on submitting an AI written essay but I need more
> quotes with page numbers to back up stuff. I wonder if the very
> nature if AI is to pull from a wide range of sources so its almost
> counter to its programming to be specific.  I'm surprised though
> because the research one I used does pull out specific journals so
> don't know why it's so hard to find a quote from the journal)
> 
> Paul
> 
> PAUL COLLEY | pchcolley at yahoo.co.uk | +44 7862 175114 

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