Over the last years, tools that use artificial intelligence algorithms to generate written content by comparison to a large dataset of training data, such as ChatGPT, have become widely accessible (these are often referred to as “GenAI tools”). Whilst these tools offer many possibilities to support learning, they also come with challenges and are no substitute for one of the fundamental goals of your graduate study, which is to learn through practicing the craft of scientific writing.
If you use such tools for your research or courses, you should be aware of the privacy implications for doing so: for more information, please refer to UBC’s Privacy Impact Assessment for generative AI tools. In addition, if you use these tools or other non-scholarly sources, you must disclose your use of them. See the general UBC guidelines.
It is unacceptable to have a generative AI tool write assignments (or parts of assignments) as well as text for your thesis or dissertation. See the guidelines from G+PS. You should be aware that generative AI tools can produce biased, false or misleading content, because of the nature of the content in the training datasets. They are designed to produce the most statistically plausible text result, not necessarily the correct one, and they cannot take responsibility for what they produce. You, on the other hand, must take responsibility for the accuracy and integrity of your written work: therefore, you should not consider the output of a generative AI tool to be reliable unless verified by information in scholarly sources, and the information included in your assignments and thesis or dissertation must be found in and attributed to scholarly sources and you must write it yourself.
There are other common applications that use generative AI, including spelling and grammar editors and translation applications (e.g., Grammarly and Google Translate). You may use spelling and grammar editors to double-check an assignment draft or thesis/dissertation. Similarly, you may use a translation application to translate words and short phrases that you have written in another language and wish to use in your assignment. However, it is unacceptable to write your assignment (or a substantive part), thesis or dissertation in another language and use an application to translate it to English.
Note that the specific guidelines for use of GenAI for individual courses is decided by the course instructor.
This page is built on guidelines from UBC, G+PS, Faculty of Science, and UBC Science 113.