By Sarah Daponde Asst. Arts & Features Editor The Education Technology Office hosted an event on March 25 to teach attendees about Consensus, an AI tool of growing popularity. The event, “What’s the Consensus? An AI Tool for Literature Searching,” was hosted in person and over Zoom. Steven Courchesne, co-coordinator and visiting assistant professor of the Educational Technology department, and Rebecca Dowgiert, reference librarian at the Whittemore Library, led the discussion. Courchesne began the discussion by demonstrating how Consensus works. He said users can ask a question and Consensus searches Semantic Scholar - another AI-powered search engine - and compiles the information into a graph to show how all the data differs. “What makes Consensus a little bit different from the tools we’ve looked at in the past is it has a feature that tries to pull together a sense of what the research body says about this topic,” said Courchesne. To demonstrate, Courchesne asked, “Are AI detectors reliable?” and Consensus pulled statistics from five different studies and put the results into a meter diagram. The red part of the meter represented the data saying AI detectors are not reliable, and the green represented data saying they are reliable. There was also a yellow portion for “maybe.” “It gives you this visualization to help you think about whether your question is going to go in one direction or another,” he added. He said users are also able to ask more than just yes or no questions and Consensus will be able to find answers. Consensus also has an AI analysis of key findings, said Courchesne. “It breaks down some of the specific things that it found and it associates the citations with each of those findings,” he added. Consensus lists suggested prompts, as well, to help users research further questions. “You could ask that question and then take a look at the related prompts to think, OK, what’s another way I could consider addressing this?’” He said there is a paid version of Consensus, but he has only used the free version. Courchesne said Consensus is a useful tool for studying literature. He said he usually uses Consensus while writing his literature reviews to see if he is on the right path, but it is helpful at multiple stages in the writing process. “A suggestion from my wife… ‘What if you actually write your literature review first and then you use this as a way to check up on what you did?’” added Courchesne. He said researching with Consensus after writing can help highlight counterarguments. “If I was going to use this with my students to write a paper or to do a research project of some shape or another - at what point would be the right moment to introduce this kind of a tool with them?” asked Courchesne. He added that he goes back and forth between wanting them to use it before or after completing the assignment. Dowgiert said she used Consensus to research AI in higher education. The results varied on how efficient different AI tools could be. “For the moment, it’s early days yet and many schools are ‘use at your own risk,’” said Dowgiert, referring to AI tools. She added that there is no perfect research index yet, whether it is AI supported or not. “In two years, this product came a long way, and it may be something really interesting and different in a couple of years. We’ll just have to wait and see,” said Dowgiert. Courchesne added users are able to ask one question without creating an account first, and 10 questions per month for free. There is also a paid subscription that answers an unlimited number of questions. Courchesne and Dowgiert then invited attendees to try Consensus themselves and share their results.