At the BYU Library, we take a mindful approach to using generative AI.

We reflect on the costs.

• Economic: using AI may have economic implications beyond yourself.
• Environmental: using AI is not environmentally neutral. It requires a lot of electricity to power the AI servers.
• Ethical: using AI may prevent you from meeting the standards of a class, a practice, or an organization. It may violate your personal integrity, a policy, a cultural expectation, or a gospel code of conduct—or even break a law, like copyright law.
• Personal: using AI may come at a personal cost as you prioritize this skill over others.

We are intentional with our input.

• Choosing tools: we consider how AI tools are trained and commoditized. We also pay attention to their limitations. We choose the right tool for the right context.
• Prompt engineering: we carefully design the prompts we put into AI tools by providing such information as a role for the AI tool to play, a context for that role, and an audience. We revise our prompts so that we achieve the results we expect.
• Protecting privacy: we follow existing privacy guidelines when using generative AI. We protect copyrighted information, institutional data, and the privacy of individuals whose information we may be using to prompt the AI tool. We anonymize personal information where possible, and we do not use a tool if it cannot guarantee the protection of our data.

We are honorable with our output.

• Attribution: we provide the proper attribution to the AI tool when we record and distribute the information it generated. We follow the guidelines in publication manuals and the instructions given by stakeholders like professors or supervisors.
• Not replacing original thinking: we use AI to supplement our thinking rather than to replace our thinking. We view original thinking as an important part of our personal development.