How to use generative AI in an ethical way
If a course allows the use of AI, you must use it within Massey rules. The ability to effectively and ethically use AI tools to streamline work and save time will be a skill future employers will value. Where you have permission to use AI tools you must keep and provide records that identify the tool used, reference it appropriately, and describe how you used it to produce your work.
What you may be allowed to do with AI tools
Depending on your course you may be able to:
- generate ideas to help you overcome writer’s block
- summarise your notes or identify key points for revision purposes
- simplify complex academic concepts
- identify grammar or vocabulary errors and typos in your originally-produced text.
What you must do when using any AI-generated outputs
- Fact-check AI-generated content against academic sources.
- Revise and rework any AI-generated text extensively, making sure that the ideas produced are relevant for the task and context.
- Look for any potentially biased assumptions embedded in the output.
- Always do your own independent search for your own quality references.
- Check the accuracy of any AI produced references. AI frequently produces false and inaccurate references. You need to know and check what the original sources say to determine if they have been used/cited accurately.
- Be extremely cautious about entering personal or sensitive information into an AI tool (yours or anyone else’s) as this information becomes part of the AI tool’s database and can be used in ways you can’t control. Guard your own intellectual property.
- Keep a full record of all tools you have used.
- Keep a record of the prompts you used.
- Save all outputs produced by AI tools. This includes all the AI-produced text and subsequent drafts or versions of your work.
You may be asked to:
- identify the tools used
- provide the AI-generated content in an appendix or separate document
- explain how you used that content
- indicate where any of this content was used within your assignment.
What you must not do with AI
When using AI you must not:
- pass off AI-created content as your own. Copying and pasting chunks of text generated by an AI tool into your assessment is plagiarism.
- take what an AI tool produces at face value. If your assessment contains fabricated data, this is academic fraud.
- use paraphrasing tools to rewrite material someone else has written and copy it into your text. Submitting this as your own work is plagiarism. (Using a translation tool on material you have authored yourself is not an integrity breach.)
- use AI tools if a course has stated that they should not be used.
AI detection
The university uses Turnitin’s built-in AI detection tool. This tool looks for patterns of words and sentences typical of AI generated text to estimate how much of a text appears to have been generated by AI. Turnitin only flags text when the tool reaches a 98% or higher confidence level.
Turnitin has a false positive rate of between 1 and 2%. This means that out of every 100 assignments submitted to Turnitin, 1 or 2 ‘human generated’ assignments may be flagged by the software as possibly being AI-generated. This is why the university does not rely only on Turnitin but also uses your course coordinator’s judgements of your work and why you will always be given an opportunity to discuss the suspected use of AI before any misconduct is considered.
What happens if the university suspects AI use
It is important to understand that being asked to discuss your assignment is not an allegation of academic misconduct.
Because we know that there is the chance that some assignments may be incorrectly flagged as having been produced by AI, we will always give you an opportunity to explain your work. Telling us how you developed your argument and showing your drafts, notes and summaries of readings and journal articles helps us to understand that your work is not AI-generated.
We also know that it takes time to understand what is acceptable in academic writing, and that sometimes students make mistakes, so where AI use is suspected, course coordinators will usually give students three options:
- To resubmit the work for a capped mark.
- To show their drafts, notes, etc, so that the course coordinator can see that it is the student’s own work.
- To request a meeting with an Academic Integrity Officer.
If students ignore these options and do not respond to their course coordinator they will receive a 0 grade. If there are complicating factors such as repeated use of AI across multiple assessments, the student may be referred directly to the Academic Integrity Officer.
