At the time of writing this web page, the following free generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI) large language model (LLM) AI tools are approved by UBC as doing a reasonably good job at protecting your privacy. If you want to use AI, focus on only one of the options listed below. No need to use all the AI tools to succeed in this course -- any one tool is sufficient. (CAUTION: Privacy is NOT guaranteed by any AI.)
Note: You are allowed to use paid versions of AI tools if you want, but these have even less privacy, and are NOT approved by UBC. (But they are also not prohibited.)
In mid June 2026, I experimented with both ChatGPT and Copilot. The UBC (enterprise) version of Copilot, which all UBC students have free access to, has roughly the same capabilities as a paid (not private) version of ChatGPT. The free version of ChatGPT is less capable than the paid version.
==> Bottom line: as of June 2026, of the two, free, Approved tools for students at UBC, my opinion is that Copilot is better.
For Copilot, log into the microsoft 365 ai account that all UBC students have free access to. Do this by using your Campus Wide Login (CWL) credentials. At some point in the login, it will ask you if you want to use Copilot for your organization (i.e., the secure enterprise version), or if you want to use a personal account. You should select "Copilot for your organization", or similar option.
To learn more about privacy and security in Copilot, you can prompt Copilot by asking it the following:
What copilot settings do I use to prevent material that I input from getting into the wider community?
Copilot will provide a detailed description -- saying mostly that the core protection is already built into the enterprise version, as was set by UBC IT personnel.
These next two slides discuss copilot settings and privacy.
CAUTION: After Copilot provides answers, it often displays "thumbs-up" and "thumbs-down" and other icons, to give Copilot feedback about whether you liked its answer or not. Do NOT select any of these feedback icons, because it bypasses your security settings, and sends a transcript of your interaction to Copilot.
If the AI tool you use asks if you would like to make the AI better for everyone (by learning from its conversations with you), just say NO !
If you are worried that ChatGPT might be set to not keep your conversations private, follow the steps in the figure below: go into Settings and follow the series of pop-up menus as shown in the figure. This method works for both free and paid accounts (the example in the figure is my personal paid account).
Perhaps in the near future, UBC will assume that ALL students and faculty use AI tools. But for now, during the AI transition, UBC instructors of many courses require that you indicate (i.e., cite) the AI tool, its version, and the date you accessed AI, for each instance where you use it.
However, in this course, we will assume that you could be using AI for all aspects of the course except for the in-class activities, including exams and iClicker questions. For this reason, we do NOT require you to cite each AI usage. Nonetheless, you might want to cite it (or keep a log ) everywhere you use it, for your own records, to help you keep track of which AI tools gave good answers and which gave bad answers that caused you to lose points.
The bottom line is that you, not the professor, is responsible for your learning. We professors try to provide the opportunity and motivation for you to learn, but ultimately it is up to you. Learning is hard work. AI tools might make doing assignments easier, but might short-circuit your learning. Take responsibility for your own learning.
To enhance your ability to use AI to help you learn, we the instructors will try to create a catalog of excellent prompts that you could use. See the Resources tab above, to access these prompts (under construction) .
Employers want to hire people with subject-domain skills (e.g., meteorology) and with artificial-intelligence skills. You should know the architecture of your field (e.g., meteorology) well enough to navigate it. The problem in university education is that students can use ai to short-circuit their subject-domain and judgement skills.
For your subject, skills should include:
Namely, employers want to hire people who have good judgement. Employees who can think, and can reason. Employees don't need to come with memorized facts in their head, because facts are infinitely and instantly available for free via tools such as ai that access the internet.
In this course, I will try to encourage critical thinking and judgement, via the warm-up questions based on your readings, and via the iClicker questions in class. To help with this, I will utilize R.W. Paul's six types of Socratic questions.
My motivation for this focus is the 2026 YouTube podcast by House of El , which has a provocative discussion about "a model for education that was built for a world that no longer exists" due to ai .
Credits: Fig. 1 created by Stull using output from copilot. Fig. 2 is from a presentation given by Prof. Stull to the EOAS faculty in Apr 2026, using output from chatGPT.