Development of artificial intelligence assistants for information literacy: opportunities and challenges

Conference presented at Mexinfo 2024: International Seminar on Artificial Intelligence and Information Integrity.
Mexico City, August 8, 2024

1. Development of artificial intelligence
assistants for information literacy:
opportunities and challenges
International Seminar on Artificial
Intelligence and Information Integrity
Mexico City, August 8, 2024
Dr. Juan D. Machin- Mastromatteo Mtro. César Saavedra-Alamillas Mtro. JosmelPacheco- Mendoza

2. Why use artificial
intelligence (AI)
assistants for
information literacy?
Complementary images from Pexels and DALL- E

3. AI assistants
Allow customizing and delimiting LLM’s behavior for:
Services
Teaching and learning processes
Problem-solving
Personalized orientation
Two main categories:
Licensed: they can be generated with a premium
account and can be publicly shared.
Open source: they are not as intuitive or powerful,
but it might be worth using them (for example,
Mistral.ai
or You).
ChatGPT is one of the first LLMs to allow configuring
agents, which can also be tried out in the
Playground
(free, but with limitations).

4. Configuring an assistant with ChatGPT
Shouldwe
takea closer
look?
Why develop an assistant and not
asking ChatGPT directly?

5. Name of the assistant
Description: what it does and what for, provide it with a certain context around
the tasks it will perform.
Instructions: brief and clear of every task (inputs, outputs, actions, follow-up
questions), tone, roles, types of questions and answers it will address, which topics
or responses it should avoid.
Starting points for conversations. These can be a list of the tasks it can do, so the
user can click on what is most interested in without guessing the specific prompt.
Knowledge base: full text documents to upload with detailed instructions, descriptions, concepts or data. For instance, use “document X” in your knowledge base to do “Y”. If it has to analyze data, the “Code Interpreter” must be enabled..
To allow it or not to connect to the Web to prepare its answers
Allows generating images with DALL-E’s technology
For analyzing data, documents in its knowledge base, and perform calculations
Needed to work with API
Setting up the assistant

6. Training your assistant
▪Develop instructions with very simple sentences
▪Be concise and precise, no unnecessary words
▪Use a controlled vocabulary
▪Add context (background, situations, main concepts
and solutions, roles, public, challenges).
▪Describe how to present answers in different cases
▪Test and experiment until getting the desired results
▪Start with one task, then others, then integrate them
in more complex instructions and processes.

7. Sconul’sSeven
Pillars of Information Literacy
Sconul’sskills
Identify, scope, plan, gather, evaluate, manage, present
IA assistant
concepts, vocabulary, resources, challenges, criteria,
procedures, examples, exercises/problems
What?
How?Where?
Is this
correct?

8. The assistant can support the user to conduct the following tasks
Evaluate performance of the user in every step
Ethical use of information
Information management
Citation styles and reference managers
Source selection and evaluation
Information-seeking
Define, limiting and understanding the topic
Identifying the information need

9. Assistant demo

16. Conclusion
▪Configuring assistants is not easy, requires time and patience.
▪Limit what the IA prepares for the user and set it to encourage
the user to work, develop their critical thinking and assess their
performance, not to have their work done!
▪The adoption of AI is delicate, for scholarly documents, the
person must have fundamental knowledge about information
sources, their characteristics, scientific writing, nature of
statements and intertextuality.

17. Can AI assistants be an alternative way of developing information-literate individuals?

18. Thanks for your attention!
Dr. Juan D. Machin Mastromatteo
Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua
Mexico
Mtro. César Saavedra
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Mexico
Mtro. JosmelPacheco Mendoza
Universidad Científica del Sur
Peru