Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Students

 If you use an AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT) without permission from your professor to create your assignment and then submit it as your own work, you are committing breaches of academic integrity in a variety of ways:  

You would be cheating

• Cheating includes misrepresenting one’s knowledge by using any unauthorized device or aid in the preparation or completion of an academic assessment. If you did not get permission from your professor to use an AI tool for your assignment and do so anyway, you would be using an unauthorized aid. As you are submitting an assignment that was not done by you, you would misrepresent what you can do and what you know.

You may be plagiarizing

• Plagiarism means presenting the ideas and words of others as your own without giving proper credit to the original sources. If you are submitting an assignment that was created by an AI tool as your own creation, you are presenting the ideas of others, even if this "other" is not a human being.

You may be submitting fabricated or false information

• Fabrication refers to the intentional use of invented information or the falsification of research or other findings. Text generating AI tools such as ChatGPT sometimes make up information and references to sources that don't exist. This is commonly referred to as "AI Hallucination". If you submit an assignment that contains information, research, or data that is made up and/or references that don't exist, then you are committing academic integrity misconduct in the form of fabrication.

You may be infringing copyright

• AI tools use content from the internet to generate their output. In Canada, content in a fixed form is automatically copyrighted.  For example, if you prompt a text-generating AI tool like ChatGPT to create a song similar to Leonard Cohen's "Anthem", or ask an image-generating AI tool like DALL-E to create an image using the style of a contemporary artist, you may be infringing copyright as AI tools draw from the existing works and reproduce derivatives of them.