Copilot takes off at UTRGV

Microsoft’s latest generative AI-powered assistant, Copilot, is now accessible to students,faculty and staff as of last Thursday, at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley as a “safer alternative” to receive information and resources. 

Chief information officer at UTRGV, Jefferey Graham, explained that since generative AI is already part of students daily lives, the university wanted to promote a tool that would still benefit students acdemically. 

“Students just like faculty and staff are using these tools,” Graham said. “We need to make sure that what we’re trying to use these tools for are leading to the outcomes we want the students to learn.”  

Qi Lu, professor for the department of computer science recently attended a workshop hosted by Microsoft to learn how to implement Copilot in his department. 

He said Copilot can help his department with tasks or general problems such as how to organize resources and learn where to access them. 

Professor Lu attends generative AI workshops in his free time to learn how to better educate himself for the whole purpose of using AI in the classroom. 

“The current trend is to embrace generative AI like Chatgpt or Copilot, not block them,” Lu said. 

According to Graham, the difference between Copilot is that unlike generative chats, Copilot does not hold personal information.  

“On ChatGPT if you give personal information, that information is used to train the model, since Copilot is under a [UTRGV] business agreement, if you give personal information, it’s not used to train the model,” UTRGV chief information officer said. 

Graham explained an additional guardrail Microsoft is using to help minimize hallucinations is that Copilot fact checks the answer to the question given.   

“[Copilot will] tell you the answer to this question and it’ll tell you where it got that information,” he added.

Emanuel Sanchez, a UTRGV computer science senior, used Copilot in his job and uses ChatGPT to get resources for his research paper, said he had to be “skeptical” of some of the responses given when using Chatgpt. 

“It’s really simple to ask a question, but I try to check things like cross-reference… explain a problem I don’t understand,” he said. 

With the intent of providing public accessibility of Copilot, Graham mentioned that success in students’ academics is dependable on how they use the AI-powered assistant. 

“If you use it to take a shortcut… you’re cheating yourself but if you use it as another tool to explore topics and to help you structure things, [Copilot will] help you,” he said. 

For students interested in accessing this new educational tool provided by Microsoft and UTRGV, students, faculty and staff can go to copilot.microsoft.com or download the app and log in using their UTRGV credentials.