This guidance outlines how you might make use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) without breaking the rules on the University Rules & Regulations > student conduct webpage.

Sheffield Hallam University wishes to gratefully acknowledge the work of the Senior Education Leadership team at UCL, who agreed that we can use their guidance as the basis for these pages.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT, DALLE-2, CoPilot, and most recently Google Bard have attracted attention, with the suggestion that they will write your assignments for you. All of these can be helpful tools for generating content that might contribute to assessed work.

At Sheffield Hallam, we believe these tools are potentially transformative as well as disruptive; that they will feature in many academic and professional workplaces; and that rather than seek to prohibit your use of them, we will support you in using them effectively, ethically, and transparently.

• Watch the ChatGPT and Academic Integrity video for more guidance.
• Read the AI for Education's Student Guide for AI Use.

Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity – AI&AI

It is important you do not use AI tools to generate an assignment and submit it as if it were your own work. Our regulations state:

Contract cheating/concerns over authorship: This form of misconduct involves another person (or artificial intelligence) creating the assignment which you then submit as your own. Examples of this sort of misconduct include: buying an assignment from an 'essay mill'/professional writer; submitting an assignment which you have downloaded from a file-sharing site; acquiring an essay from another student or family member and submitting it as your own; attempting to pass off work created by artificial intelligence as your own. These activities show a clear intention to deceive the marker and are treated as misconduct.

What is AI good for?

• Answering questions where answers are based on material which can be found on the internet.
• Drafting ideas and planning or structuring written materials.
• Generating ideas for graphics, images, and visuals.
• Reviewing and critically analysing written materials to assess their validity.
• Helping to improve your grammar and writing structure – especially helpful if English is a second language.
• Experimenting with different writing styles.
• Getting explanations.
• Debugging code.
• Getting over writer's block.

On some courses, using specific kinds of artificial intelligence might be forbidden, because of the skills your tutors want you to develop. Seek your tutors' guidance.

For information on labelling AI in your work here is a video you can watch.

Limitations and drawbacks of using AI

AI tools are powerful and easy to use, but they can provide misleading or incorrect information. They can offer shortcuts that reduce the need for critical engagement, a key to deep and meaningful learning. You need to be aware of the difference between reasonable use of such tools, and at what point their use might be regarded as a way of avoiding necessary thinking on your part.

Artificial and human intelligence are not the same; AI tools do not understand anything they produce, nor do they understand what the words they produce mean when applied to the real world.

Open.ai, the creators of ChatGPT, have provided helpful guidance for educators and students:

• Whilst their output can appear plausible and well written, AI tools frequently get things wrong and can't be relied upon for factual accuracy.
• They perform better in subjects which are widely written about, and less well in niche or specialist areas.
• Unlike a normal internet search, they don't look up current resources and are therefore some months out of date.
• They cannot currently provide references – they fabricate well formatted but fictitious citations.
• They can perpetuate stereotypes, biases, and Western perspectives.

More fundamentally, overreliance on these tools will reduce your opportunities to hone your writing, critical thinking, and evaluation skills.

You can develop these skills through interrogation of the outputs from AI. By studying what these systems produce you can evaluate its validity and reliability. Some of your tutors may well ask you to use AI for exactly this type of task, perhaps as part of a formal assessment.

Acknowledging, referencing, and citing AI generated material in your work

If your tutors have not forbidden the use of AI, and if you decide to use it to produce an assignment, you must describe and reference how you have used it.

Acknowledgement

You must acknowledge the use of AI: name the tool and how it was used using the following style.

• 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.

Description of use of AI

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 style 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>

You should keep your drafts as evidence of the way in which you have made use of AI in the production of your assignment.

Reference

You must reference (or cite if appropriate) using APA7 referencing [unless explicitly told to use a different form of referencing by your tutor or lecturer].