Welcome to the AI in the Workplace guide! This guide was created in Fall 2025 for BT 273 by Faculty Librarian Greg Bem and BT Instructor Janelle Brooke. Email Greg or Janelle if you have any questions or feedback about this guide.
This guide is designed to introduce students to Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and explore some of the ways it shows up in the workplace. Ethical and problematic aspects of GenAI technology are also explored, so students may reach a better, more critical understanding of GenAI as they consider using it at work.
"Artificial intelligence is a field of science concerned with building computers and machines that can reason, learn, and act in such a way that would normally require human intelligence or that involves data whose scale exceeds what humans can analyze.
"AI is a broad field that encompasses many different disciplines, including computer science, data analytics and statistics, hardware and software engineering, linguistics, neuroscience, and even philosophy and psychology."
(Google)
"Generative AI refers to deep-learning models that can generate high-quality text, images, and other content based on the data they were trained on."
(IBM)
Updated March 2024
The following links will take you to popular GenAI tools. A free or paid account may be required to generate images.
Practicing with free tools and viewing galleries for paid tools is a good way to familiarize yourself with the capabilities, look, and feel of AI image generators. You'll likely notice a difference between the tools, even those based in the same model.
DALL-E (OpenAI)
Midjourney (Link to gallery)
Stable Diffusion (Link to gallery)
Adobe Firefly (Link to gallery)
Updated June 2025
Ethics in the context of technology typically means using technology in a way that aligns with community values and standards. Ethics is a large topic with many branches. Occasionally in academia, ethics is connected to academic integrity. The Spokane Community College (SCC) Student Handbook describes another related area of thought, student conduct:
"Students are expected to conduct themselves as responsible members of the academic community. This includes obeying the law, complying with policies, procedures and rules of the district, the colleges and their departments, and maintaining a high standard of integrity and honesty and respecting the rights, privileges and property of others."
As members of the academic community, we should apply this way of thinking to how we interact with technology tools, including those that use GenAI.
“Some Harm Considerations of Large Language Models (LLMs)” by Rebecca Sweetman is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International.
Just because we can automate work, does not mean we should. For example, an employee who has just been hired and does not yet understand all of the ins and outs of their role or their organization still needs to learn (and apply) the organizational knowledge and reach certain proficiency to be critical workers. This can take a little or long period of time. Once the work and the organization are understood, automation may be a proper next step. Phrases like "work smarter, not harder" are becoming popular, and rely on the workers to have that critical understanding to "work smarter."
Here are some examples of how GenAI tools can support tasks once a worker is critically aware:
Remember to stay keen! These examples may benefit from using GenAI tools; however, they may also become more complicated by the use of the tool. In some cases, the tools may take longer to use than if the human was to do the work on their own. If you choose to use these tools at the workplace, regularly reflecting on the time and energy using the tools take, especially in comparison to the time and energy not using the tools takes, is a healthy long-term practice.
One of the most robust ways we can evolve our relationship with technology and tools at work is by asking questions about them. This level of critical thinking can improve how we accept (or reject) the use of the tools for specific tasks, and how we consider them as options when we consider the work we do in our roles. Asking yourself broad, open-ended questions that may not have a single answer will lead you on the path toward a lifelong relationship with the technology, where we can stay cautious and stay curious in a healthy way.
Want to learn more about these topics?
Check out SCC's main GenAI LibGuide to get access to even more information.
The following are examples of books that can be checked out from the library! There are many other titles available in the library, including in eBook format. Take a look at the search results in Primo for more book ideas.
