Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has stormed higher education over the past year.
 

Read the open letter to Humanities and Social Sciences students by Professor Matei Candea, Academic Project Director for Technology and Teaching and Dr Ella McPherson, Deputy Head of School and Director of Education. 

This piece builds on their 'Manifesto and Principles for AI in Scholarship'.

Where is the line?
 

GenAI is a fast-moving target, and it is increasingly being built into everyday tools we are already familiar with. Powerpoint can suggest nice ways of laying out your presentations, and Grammarly, formerly a grammar checking tool, has had an AI-makeover and now claims it can make your writing ‘more convincing’, amongst other things. So some students are raising questions about where the line is between inappropriate and appropriate use of these tools.
 

Let’s keep it simple: spell-checkers are fine. Tools which highlight poor grammar (like the old-style Word grammar checkers) are fine. Anything which actually writes or edits your writing for you is not. Under no circumstances should the text generated by such AI-assisted tools be presented as your own work.
 

• Doing this in assessed work constitutes academic misconduct. While we are thinking actively about how we might in future engage with AI in diverse forms of teaching and assessment, zero-AI assessments (such as invigilated exams) will likely remain a core part of our assessment landscape going forward.
• Doing so in non-assessed work, such as supervision essays, is a waste of your own chance to learn. Don’t let genAI rob you of your chance to learn!