A laptop in a dark room. The screen is full of green code text.

As we explored in section 6 on referencing and citations, and as we covered throughout the sections on academic writing, when you are studying at university it is important to ensure you are engaging in what's referred to as 'good academic practice', and that you avoid plagiarising the work of others. This is all part of a concept known as 'academic integrity'.

This is relevant when considering how you might use generative AI tools because part of academic integrity is having respect for and acknowledging the work of others and how it has contributed to your thinking. In academic writing this usually takes the form of citations and lists of references. When you generate work using tools such as Bard or ChatGPT then the link to the sources is lost, through the modelling and training process. As such you may be benefitting from earlier work, but can't easily acknowledge it. Any profits from your activity (e.g. a subscription to the AI service) is unlikely to reward the people whose works were used to build the underlying model or to train it.

With AI, never take what the AI generates as something you can just hand in.

Always think AI is there to help me, not to replace me. So look at what it produces, whether it's computer code, whether it's it's ideas for an assignment, images or other outputs, and ask yourself: "is that what I wanted it to produce for me?" And then, if it's going to be submitted, you need to acknowledge that this is what the AI did. This is the prompt that you gave it, so it's very clear to the person marking your work, that this is what the the AI tool produced. It's the same principle as reading a book or an article and saying, "okay, I've got these ideas from this book. Here's the reference to it." So AI acknowledge it, check what the module requirements are about using AI and you should acknowledge it using the wording given to you on the submission sheet. You may want to provide an appendix (a section at the end of the work, added after the assessed part) to provide further details about the prompt(s) you used and how you edited and critically evaluated the work generated by the AI tool. There are examples in Cite Them Right of how you can acknowledge and how you can cite material produced by AI, so that you can avoid being accused of plagiarism.

How can I tell if it would be considered plagiarising?

Two things to consider:

1. Are you submitting work that is the result of your own cognitive effort?

When staff are marking work they want to know that the argument, the selection of examples, the data, the interpretation and conclusion are a mix of your own work and relevant examples taken (and duly acknowledged) from others. If you offload this process entirely to ChatGPT then you are not demonstrating the subject expertise that passing the assessment would indicate, you are just showing that you can use ChatGPT.

2. Is the work in your own words?

Or are substantial portions of it generated in another way - whether by paying someone for it, or having it generated for you (by a person or program).

Remember

You can find information about QMU's plagiarism policy here and information about use of generative AI here.

Acknowledgement: Content adapted from Murray, M. (2023) 'A student guide to generative AI'. Available at: https://dcad.awh.durham.ac.uk/generativeai/#/ (Accessed 3 May 2024) and Cite Them Right (2025) 'How to avoid plagiarism when using AI?'. Available at: https://www.citethemrightonline.com/video?docid=CTR_6370187425112&tocid=CTR_file_6370187425112 (Accessed 22 May 2025).

Image: Markus Spiske on Unsplash