1. Check the policy first — it outranks this guide

Every institution draws the line somewhere different, and some draw it in different places for different courses. One lecturer allows AI for brainstorming and editing but not drafting. Another bans it outright for a take-home exam. A third asks students to disclose any AI use in an appendix. All three are “the rules” for their own students, and none of them care what a guide on the internet says.

So the first step is boring and non-negotiable: read your course handbook, your assignment brief, and your institution’s academic integrity policy before you open the tool. If they conflict, ask your tutor — in writing, so you have the answer. I know students who skipped this step and then argued “but the tool is publicly available” after a penalty, as if availability were permission. It isn’t. A calculator is publicly available too, and it still isn’t allowed in every exam.

If your institution bans AI for a piece of work, that settles it. Don’t look for a clever workaround. The rest of this guide is for work where AI use is permitted, with limits — which is now the most common position.

2. Fair use is about what you hand in, not which button you pressed

Here’s the distinction that clears up most of the confusion. Using AI to help you think is different from using AI to replace your thinking, and markers can usually tell the difference — not because they run a detector, but because the work itself gives it away.

On the fair side of the line, in my judgment: brainstorming angles for an essay, turning your own rough notes into an outline, asking a tool to explain a concept you don’t understand in plain language, rephrasing a sentence you wrote so it reads more clearly, and checking your grammar. In each case, the thinking is yours. The tool is doing support work around it.

On the wrong side: pasting in a prompt and submitting the output, asking a tool to write your literature review from scratch, generating an argument you haven’t read or understood, and — the one that gets people in the most trouble — letting a tool invent your evidence. A paragraph you can’t defend in a tutorial isn’t your paragraph, even if you edited a few words in it.

A test I use: if your tutor asked you to explain your essay’s argument out loud, without notes, could you? If the answer is yes, you probably did the thinking. If you’d be stuck on your own second paragraph, the tool did it for you.

3. Your sources must be real — check every citation yourself

This is the single most practical warning in this guide. AI tools confidently invent citations: real-sounding authors, plausible journal titles, articles that never existed. I’ve seen a draft with five references where two were entirely fabricated and a third was a real paper cited for a claim it never made. The student hadn’t checked any of them. She’d trusted the tool’s confidence, and confidence is exactly what these tools are best at faking.

My rule is simple: never submit a citation you haven’t opened yourself. Open the paper, find the claim, and check it says what you say it says. If you can’t find the source, drop it — no matter how perfect it looked. A missing reference is a gap you can fix; a fabricated one is an integrity problem.

The same applies to quotations. If a tool gives you a quote, verify it in the original text before it goes anywhere near your essay. Tools paraphrase loosely, merge two ideas into one “quote,” and occasionally attribute words to the wrong person entirely. Your name is on the essay, not the tool’s.

4. Disclose what you used, the way your course asks

Disclosure is where honest students often trip up, because the format varies so much. Some courses want a short statement — “AI was used to edit grammar and restructure paragraphs; all ideas and sources are my own.” Others want a log of prompts. Some want nothing at all beyond following the policy.

Do what your course asks, and when it asks for nothing specific, disclose anyway in a sentence or two. It’s cheap insurance. A brief, honest note — what the tool did, what you did — protects you far more than silence does, because it shows you weren’t trying to hide anything. And keep your prompts and your drafts. If anyone ever asks how a piece of work came together, a folder with your notes, your outline, and two or three draft versions answers the question better than any explanation.

What you don’t need to do is over-disclose to the point of absurdity. You don’t need to log every spellcheck. Disclose the substantive uses: drafting help, restructuring, summarising sources, generating ideas you actually used. That’s the level markers care about.

5. Keep your own thinking visible in the draft

The best protection against an academic-integrity problem is a draft that visibly carries your thinking. That means your own notes first, your own outline second, and the tool third — not the other way round.

When I work with students, I ask them to start on paper or in a blank document: what is my argument in one sentence? What are my three strongest pieces of evidence? Where am I least sure? Only then do they open a tool, and only to test that argument — to find its weak spots, to suggest a counterargument they should answer, to tighten a paragraph they already wrote. The order matters. A tool that meets a blank page will fill it with generic argument. A tool that meets a real argument will sharpen it.

Save the versions as you go. Version one is your notes. Version two is your outline. Version three is your draft with tool-assisted edits. That trail isn’t bureaucracy; it’s proof of authorship, and it’s also just good writing practice. The students I’ve seen get into trouble almost always have one file, created in one sitting, with no trail at all.

The honest truth

AI tools aren’t going away from academic life, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. But neither is the point of academic writing going away: it’s to show that you understood something, weighed evidence, and built an argument you can stand behind. A tool can help you do all of that faster and more clearly. It cannot do it for you, and the moment it does, the work stops being yours — even if your name is on it.

Use the tool for thinking support, check every source yourself, disclose what you used, and keep your own argument at the centre. Do that, and you can use AI with a clear conscience. Skip it, and no amount of clever prompting will save a piece of work you can’t explain or defend.

Frequently Asked Questions