University Position
The university believes that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a very useful tool to aid learning, and its effective, responsible use is likely to be a desired trait for employers. However, its use must be guided by principles of academic integrity and with awareness of the risks it poses, when not used with care.
Encouraged use of AI
We encourage the use of AI to aid your learning, for example to find material on a topic that you will then consider and explore in more depth. This may include learning to support your expression and use of the English language. The use of tools such as Microsoft Editor in Word and Grammarly is permitted to check and get suggestions for spelling and grammar. However, you must not copy and paste directly from an AI tool as your written English is an assessed element of all work written in the English language, and submitted work must always be your own.
Referencing use of AI
- If you use AI to locate sources and then use those in your work, you do not need to cite the use of AI, just the sources you go on to use.
- If you use AI in the process of undertaking your assignment, for example to create an outline of your assignment or to summarize articles, you should acknowledge this by adding a declaration at the end of your work (see appended declaration).
- We discourage the use of AI as a source of facts, as it is not always accurate. However, if you do directly use information gained from an AI source, such as ChatGPT or Bing, or quote such material, you should cite this using normal referencing conventions, as shown in this guide. AI is usually cited as a form of personal correspondence or communication. For example, OpenAI ChatGPT (2023) ChatGPT response to John Smith, 2 April.
Support for using AI effectively
Support for using AI effectively and with academic integrity is available from the Academic Support Team.
Unacceptable uses of AI
- Assessments are designed to test your learning. While AI may be used to support your learning as part of the process of doing the assignment, it must not be used to create the assessed product. The use of artificial intelligence to make it appear that you have learnt more than is actually the case is academic misconduct. This could take several forms:
- Submitting work produced in whole or part by Artificial Intelligence without proper referencing.
- Copying or paraphrasing AI-generated content without proper referencing.
- Using AI to undertake analysis, evaluation or calculations without acknowledgement via the declaration of AI use form.
- Personal or sensitive information should never be entered into AI, as it stores this data. This would be deemed unethical.
Risks of using AI
Hallucination: AI can produce answers to questions that are believable but not factually accurate. Information gained from AI should always be checked with other recognised sources of information and the latter should be cited to support the information.
Privacy and IP: AI tools store and learn from information submitted into them. Personal or sensitive information should never be entered. Entry of information will result in the loss of intellectual property, as it becomes open source.
Citation: AI tools can produce both fictious citations and ones that contain false information. For help with citations, always use either a bibliography tool or a tool specifically designed to generate citations.
Insufficient opportunity to demonstrate learning: Overuse of AI may mean that you do not sufficiently demonstrate learning in your assignment and thus gain a lower grade than you could have done. Ensure that you are not using AI to meet the learning outcomes, for example, by overusing quotes or by using AI to develop the research questions, when this is one of the assignment criteria. When in doubt about this, check with your tutor.
Declaration of AI Use
Please append this page to the end of your assignment when you have used AI during the process of undertaking the assignment to acknowledge the ways in which you have used it.
