Skip to Main Content

Artificial Intelligence: AI Literacy

This guide supports faculty and students in their exploration of AI within the context of teaching and learning.

Key Terms, Definitions and Concepts

Adam Pasick. (March 27, 2023 Monday). Artificial Intelligence Glossary: Neural Networks and Other Terms Explained. The New York Times . https://advance.lexis.com/api/document?collection=news&id=urn:contentItem:67W5-96F1-DXY4-X1HF-00000-00&context=1516831.

ROBOT Test

Actively learn about AI with the ROBOT test!

This device was created by librarians Sandy Hervieux and Amanda Wheatley. You can use it when reading about AI applications to help develop your understanding of the legitimacy of the technology. 

Reliability

Objective

Bias

Ownership

Type

Reliability
  • How reliable is the information available about the AI technology?
  • If it’s not produced by the party responsible for the AI, what are the author’s credentials? Bias?
  • If it is produced by the party responsible for the AI, how much information are they making available? 
    • Is information only partially available due to trade secrets?
    • How biased is they information that they produce?
Objective
  • What is the goal or objective of the use of AI?
  • What is the goal of sharing information about it?
    • To inform?
    • To convince?
    • To find financial support?
Bias
  • What could create bias in the AI technology?
  • Are there ethical issues associated with this?
  • Are bias or ethical issues acknowledged?
    • By the source of information?
    • By the party responsible for the AI?
    • By its users?
Owner
  • Who is the owner or developer of the AI technology?
  • Who is responsible for it?
    • Is it a private company?
    • The government?
    • A think tank or research group?
  • Who has access to it?
  • Who can use it?
Type
  • Which subtype of AI is it?
  • Is the technology theoretical or applied?
  • What kind of information system does it rely on?
  • Does it rely on human intervention? 

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Hervieux, S. & Wheatley, A. (2020). The ROBOT test [Evaluation tool]. The LibrAIry. https://thelibrairy.wordpress.com/2020/03/11/the-robot-test

Sandy Hervieux is the virtual reference coordinator and the liaison librarian for political science, philosophy, and the School of Religious Studies at McGill University’s Humanities and Social Sciences Library in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Her research interests include reference services, information literacy, and the impact of artificial intelligence on user services.

Amanda Wheatley is the management, business, and entrepreneurship librarian at McGill University. She also serves as an expert for artificial intelligence and gamification in the library’s Digital Scholarship Hub. Amanda’s research is focused on the intersection of AI technologies with information seeking behaviors.

AI Timeline

PSEA's AI Timeline  

  • 1843 – Ada Lovelace with help from Charles Babbage, creates the Analytical Engine to compute numbers. Lovelace is often called the first computer programmer.
  • 1939 – At the Iowa State University, the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) is developed as a programmable digital computer by the inventor and physicist John Vincent Atanasoff with his graduate student Clifford Berry. The computer weighed more than 700 pounds and was capable of solving up to 29 simultaneous linear equations.
  • 1950 – Alan Turing publishes “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and proposes the idea of “the imitation game” (later renamed “The Turing Test”).
  • 1952 – Arthur Samuels develops the first computer checkers-playing program and the first computer to learn on its own.
  • 1957 – Frank Rosenblatt develops the Perceptron, an early artificial neural network enabling pattern recognition based on a two-layer computer learning network.
  • 1965 – Joseph Weizenbaum develops ELIZA as an interactive program that carries on a dialogue in the English language on any topic.
  • 1988 – Rollo Carpenter develops the chatbot Jabberwacky to “simulate natural human chat in an interesting, entertaining and humorous manner.” This was one of the earliest attempts at creating artificial intelligence through human interaction.
  • 1997 – Deep Blue becomes the first computer chess-playing program to beat a reigning world chess champion.
  • 2011 – IBM’s Watson, a natural language question-answering computer, participates in Jeopardy! And defeats champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The televised game marked AI’s remarkable move to the center of human conversations.
  • 2012 – Google researchers Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng report on an experiment in which they show a very large neural network with 16,000 processors detect cat images without any background information from 10 million unlabeled images randomly taken from youtube videos.
  • 2016 – Hanson Robotics introduces Sophia, a humanoid robot, as the first “robot citizen.” With her similarity to an actual human being, ability to see, make facial expressions, and communicate with the help of AI, Sophia was different from those that came before her.
  • 2018 – Alibaba develops an AI model that scores better than humans in a Stanford University reading and comprehension test. On a set of 100,000 questions, the AI model scored 82.44 against 82.30 by humans.
  • May 2020 – OpenAI’s GPT3 is first introduced, and the beta testing begins the following month. GPT3 is a language model that generates text by adopting algorithms that are pre-trained.
  • November 2020 – ChatGPT3 is released as a free demo, which can converse in human-style conversation and generate answers autonomously using large amounts of information from the Internet.
  • March 2023 – ChatGPT4 allows multimodal intelligence by adding picture recognition among other things.