Almost 25% of adults in the United States are using artificial intelligence chatbots on a daily basis, a 2026 Pew Research Center study found.

At the same time, another recent study found that 48% of the information that popular free chatbots gave in response to questions about the news contained errors.

As librarians, we know that if students are using AI chatbots to help with their academic research, they shouldn’t assume that the information they’re given is accurate.

Not all AI is the same. Here are four steps we recommend to question information AI generates, including by checking the original source and considering issues that aren’t always easy to spot.

First, we think it makes sense to spend time choosing the right AI tool for the task at hand.

AI tools – be it ExLibris’ Primo Research Assistant, Research Solutions’ Scite, Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT – are trained with various datasets and use different algorithms to generate results. They should not be used interchangeably.

Some tools might be better or worse at answering specific kinds of questions, and the types of answers they generate can vary.

People might choose ChatGPT, for example, at the beginning of their research process, because it can provide overviews and summaries to help with understanding concepts.

In subsequent stages, they might choose a tool such as Primo........

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