AI Policies | Ethical AI Use | AI Proofreading | Humanizing AI Text | AI Limitations
In this blog, we will take a look at current university guidelines for the use of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot.
1. What is ChatGPT?
Before diving into the guidelines from various universities and scientific journals, it’s important to understand how AI tools like ChatGPT are built and how they work. ChatGPT was built by feeding a computer with large amounts of text. This includes data from websites, books, blogs, social media posts, etc. What happened was, through this process, the computer learned to create text that sounds more human. In simple terms, we have given a computer a brain. So, when you ask ChatGPT a question, it looks through all the information it was trained on and generates a response based on that.
2. How does ChatGPT work?
I want you to understand a few important things about ChatGPT. Let’s do it with an example. Let’s ask ChatGPT to write a few lines about social media. Now let’s look at the response and compare it with the Wikipedia article on social media. You can notice straightaway the similarities between the two. You can see a significant overlap between the ChatGPT text and the Wikipedia article. It is very clear that ChatGPT response is a slightly modified and rewritten version of content found on the internet.
The reason why I demonstrated this is because I want you to understand three things. ChatGPT responses are not original, they are simply synthesized from the data it was trained on, mostly stuff from the internet. As we all know anybody can upload content on the internet. The Internet contains both accurate and inaccurate information. So the responses you get from AI tools may not be trustworthy. Please remember these things whenever you are working with AI tools like ChatGPT.
3. Current university guidelines
Now you have a basic understanding of ChatGPT, let’s look at the current guidelines across universities and scientific journals. We went through university guidelines of hundreds of universities regarding the use of AI. The figure below is a guideline from one of the leading universities in the world. The general guideline is that students should not submit AI-generated content as their own original work for assessments. This will be considered plagiarism. However, universities are somewhat flexible regarding the use of AI tools for proofreading and enhancing language quality.
So what does it mean? It means that you cannot ask ChatGPT to write the essay for you. For example, let’s say you have to submit an essay for your assessment about social media. You decide to ask ChatGPT to write a 1000-word essay about social media and then submit it as your own work. This will be considered plagiarism, and you will be in trouble. However, you can use AI tools to fix grammatical mistakes and improve the style and readability of your text. For example, in the figure below you are asking ChatGPT to proofread your text, and ChatGPT is giving you some ideas as to how to improve your text. ChatGPT is asking you to add commas in certain places and replace some words to improve readability. Most universities are okay with this.
Some lecturers will explicitly mention that you are allowed to use AI in your assignments, in that case, you can use AI. However you will be expected to include a detailed statement that clearly explains how AI was used in your assignments.
4. Current scientific journal guidelines
The same rules apply to scientific journals. You cannot use AI-generated content or images in your paper. The only exception is when you are writing a paper about AI, then you can include AI text and images for demonstration purposes. However, it must be clearly labeled and disclosed in your paper. Again, most journals are okay with using AI to refine and proofread your text, because you are not generating the text, you are just refining and improving your original work.
5. Summary
I hope you now have a good understanding of university guidelines for using AI. Just keep in mind that the guidelines can vary between universities, so please check and understand your own university’s rules for using AI. Furthermore, universities keep updating their guidelines, so please make sure you stay on top of them.
