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How useful are AI tools for Academics?

What I have been trying out lately.

Stephanie Decker FAcSS FBAM

Aug 29

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Before I return to Part 2 of Notebook LM, I must admit that I have recently experimented more with other tools. While I generally like Claude for its writerly style, I tried out GPT-5 after the big backlash against OpenAI’s update.

And, I was impressed. I queried it about academic literature and asked for suggestions. It returned a whole extensive literature on the subject that I had been unaware of, as it has different disciplinary affiliations. Now this is exactly what I want an LLM for!

This may not be news for those who already had a subscription to the ChatGPT research-level model, but I didn’t. I am not a fan of OpenAI for several reasons, but I specifically dislike that everything I upload will go into model training. Therefore, I tend to use Claude and Notebook LM because these tools indicate that they do not take any uploaded text into their training data. Obviously, I only have these companies’ word for it, so what I upload is my own writing and not that produced by anyone else.

But then we had news at work that MS Copilot will now use GPT5. Copilot at work remains confidential, which means it should be even better than Claude or Notebook LM, but unfortunately, it is not. (Also, our Copilot is not integrated with our Email or OneDrive or Calendar or anything, so it is honestly not that useful.) Yet with GPT5, Copilot is a new proposition.

So I went for a couple of rounds on Copilot/GPT5 these last few days to see if it can now do the things that I want from an LLM:

Monitoring new literature on a subject
Do the boring webscraping research, which I don’t want to spend time on
Generating infographics and presentations from my research papers

Don’t I want it to code my data and also find the stuff that I dimly remember but no longer know in which document/image/whatever it was? I very much want that, but I am concerned about data privacy, and until I don’t feel that this is adequate, that is just on hold.

Monitoring the literature

I asked Copilot/GPT5 whether it can create a literature monitor. I also asked Manus, which brands itself as an AI Agent service. Manus actually generated a page that looks ago and has functionalities. However, they do not deliver anything — it’s a literature monitor that is not really monitoring anything or delivering any outputs: https://19hninc83y8d.manus.space/

It would be nice if it worked. But it doesn’t. And I am not a software engineer — that is the point after all...