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Acknowledging Generative AI Use

For a detailed understanding of Unity’s stance on the use of generative AI in your studies, please read through Unity’s Policy on Generative AI use by Students in Distance Education.

Acknowledging Generative AI use in your work at Unity

Illustrations by Storyset.

Generative AI is quickly becoming a strategic tool to use in several phases of your work here at Unity. While we encourage students to utilize these tools, there are proper practices and ethical concerns that need to be considered first.

Whether you choose to use an AI tool like ChatGPT to help you brainstorm and find information or an AI tool like Grammarly to help you revise your work, ensuring you properly acknowledge your AI use can help you avoid plagiarism.

Just like any other source you use, information that comes from generative AI needs to be vetted and acknowledged. This guide will help you develop best practices for this when using generative AI.

Academic Honesty and Generative AI

Whether you’re getting information from a primary source or from one of your generative AI tools, you must always remember to provide evidence to support your claims. This means you must cite your sources (in-text) and include the full citation in the reference list, or in the case of Generative AI, you must acknowledge which AI tool you used and how you used it.

Remember what is stated the Unity Distance Education Honor Code:

“Academic dishonesty occurs when you use the work and/or words of another without proper acknowledgment. This includes content produced by generative AI.”

This means you are responsible for the work you submit. Fact-check, cite source information, and acknowledge any AI use to avoid any chance that you may run into academic honesty issues.

Here at Unity, we do not consider Generative AI to be a credible or primary source of information, but it is a tool that students can use to generate ideas, organize their ideas, and refine their writing. If you choose to use Generative AI in these ways, you must acknowledge the tool you used and how you used it.

Students must also recognize that they are still responsible for citing source information for ideas, data, and other facts shared in their work. If you add ideas and/or claims from Generative AI in your work, you are responsible for finding original, primary sources that provide evidence for these claims.

Examples of how to acknowledge Generative AI use in your work:

For any work you submit that involves the use of AI, you must include an acknowledgment somewhere in your work that includes the following:

  • Specify the AI tool(s) you used
  • Provide a brief explanation of how and for what purpose you used them.

This can appear in the footnotes of your paper or after the References Section (if there is one).

Some examples of language you can use to acknowledge your Generative AI use     

The following text will ensure that you have sufficiently acknowledged your use of Generative AI:

[AI tool] was used to complete parts of this work:  [make list of parts of work for which AI was used, and each item in the list should also include how AI was used to complete that part]

  • Example 1: ChatGPT was used to brainstorm ideas and revise grammar.
    • Ideas brainstormed with ChatGPT’s assistance appear in the introduction paragraph of this paper.
    • Grammar throughout the entire paper was revised using ChatGPT.
  • Example 2: Perplexity was used to summarize source articles before writing the body of this paper. Ideas from these source summaries were reworded into original writing by me, the paper’s author.

We also encourage you to include a direct URL link to your AI transcripts for full transparency. (See below for how to do this!)

Including your Generative AI Transcripts

For some assignments, or in some cases, you may be asked to provide your chat transcript that you created with your AI tool. Don’t worry, this is the easy part!

When you are logged into your AI tool, it will most likely save a history of the chats you have performed in the past. In the case of ChatGPT, this history is saved on the left sidebar next to the main search panel.

  1. When you have finished your chat, look to the top right corner of your search page for the share button ( arrow pointing up)
  2. A prompt box will pop up, and you will click the update and copy link button.
  3. You can now paste the direct link at the end of your acknowledgment, where others can click on it and view your full transcript.