At BU, we recognise that there is a balance to be had with using AI platforms such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, CoPilot, Google Bard, Bing and more. We want to enable our students to be creative, but also need to protect and maintain academic integrity through transparent practices.
Although AI can be helpful, it is important to recognise that there are limitations or issues with using these programmes. These include factual inaccuracies, biases and even misinformation, an inconsistent performance in subject areas, variable validity of sources used in searches and referencing issues.
You need to be aware of the difference between an unfair advantage and reasonable use of AI. If you submit an AI generated piece of assessment as your own work, it would be considered as an academic offence. Turnitin has increased capabilities to detect AI use in submitted work.
AI platforms can be used reasonably to support your work in the following ways:
- Drafting plans, structures, or ideas
- Answering questions or getting explanations
- Evaluating materials
- Starting you off on a piece of work when you have writer’s block.
If you choose to use AI to support your work, you must be transparent about its use to ensure you don’t commit a plagiarism offence. We define plagiarism as "the use of the words, constructs, or ideas of another person, without acknowledgement of the source, or the submission or presentation of work as one's own which is substantially the ideas or intellectual data of another or created artificially."
How to be transparent in use of AI
You must asknowledge using AI by naming the tool and how it was used within your references. You should use one of the following options:
- No content generated by AI technologies has been presented as my own work.
- I acknowledge the use of <insert AI system(s) and link> to generate materials for background research and self-study in the drafting of this assessment.
- I acknowledge the use of <insert AI system(s) and link> to generate materials that were included within my final assessment in modified form.
You must describe how the information or material was generated (including the prompts you used), what the output was and how the output was changed by you. You should use the following format of wording, depending on the nature of use:
- The following prompts were input into <AI system>: <List prompt(s)>
- The output obtained was: <Paste the output generated by the AI system>
- The output was changed by me in the following ways: <explain the actions taken>
Here is an example of how to include the use of AI within your references: OpenAI, 2022. ChatGPT: Optimizing Language Models for Dialogue [online]. Available at https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/. [Accessed 30 June 2023].
You also need to reference the use of AI in-text. Here is an example of how you should write this: (OpenAI 2022).
Please note, the ‘Guide to Citation and Referencing in BU’s Harvard Style’ is currently being updated to include the use of AI. So, if you have any questions about how to reference, please get in touch with your faculty library team, who are on hand to help.
