Normally I am very hesitant and reductive to use an AI program for anything, including when the assignment is requiring me to use AI. But for this assignment I used Microsoft CoPilot to create a 2-page paper about Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, in which I prompted “Can you create a two page paper on the Red Baron and how he impacted aviation”
The essay that the program wrote was very comprehensive and had sources at the end of each paragraph it wrote. For this one specific time AI was useful in creating an essay, but in all other parts of Academic work, AI should not be used to create an essay because with written assignments it is supposed to be measuring how much information you have learnt and gathered on a specific topic/idea or person. This does not show how much information I have learnt about the Red Baron or how I interpret the sources surrounding him.
The second part of the first question was to generate an image of the historic figure/event, and I asked “Can you generate a picture of the Red Baron?”
Copilot had generated a very realistic picture of Manfred von Richthofen, however I felt very wrong about using the program to generate the picture. Since I believe that you can use a photo found on an archive or database that correlates with the figure or event.
The second part of this was to find a document and have an AI program transcribe the document. I used Google Gemini for this section, since I know and have been informed that Gemini has a better record of transcription of handwritten documents. The prompt I used was “Can you transcribe this image for me?”, the transcription that I had received from Gemini was decent, it had a couple mistakes in the last names of the soldiers but it had relatively the same information as the Fredericksburg National Cemetery’s website on the specific records page I chose.