Breakthroughs in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) are currently having a major impact on the information society. Online tools such as ChatGPT make it possible to create or modify almost any text, image, piece of music or video. Tools based on generative AI are even being used in software development by creating programme code on instruction or checking its quality.

The effects on research, study and teaching are as numerous as they are serious.

• AI can greatly accelerate the production of scientific texts, but the risk of witting or unwitting plagiarism increases.
• In the future, AI-supported information services could provide additional benefits, such as the automatic summarisation or translation of scientific texts or intelligent literature searches using natural language.
• However, there are also risks associated with the use of these services: Text-generating AI, for example, sometimes 'hallucinates', i.e. invents apparent facts and sources and potentially generates sentences with false statements.
• The question of the rights to the AI-generated texts may need to be legally clarified, as may the correct handling of the rights of authors whose works are intentionally or unintentionally used for the training of AI systems.
• A way must be found to deal with the provision of examinations, which may or may not be created with AI support.

It is foreseeable that AI will have a firm place in research and teaching in the future.

BIS would like to support its users in dealing with and evaluating these new technologies. For this reason, we will be highlighting our information and training programmes on artificial intelligence and other services here in future.