Academic year 2025-2026
Policy on the use of generative AI, 2025/2026
The formal policy for this course is as follows: Academic integrity is an underlying principle of research and academic practice. All submitted work is expected to be your own. AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, the Edinburgh Language Model) should not be used to generate written text or code on your assessments for this course. However, you are allowed to use these tools to identify ideas, key themes, and plan your assessment, or to help you generate potential solutions to coding problems. You may also use it to improve the clarity of your writing. If you use AI software, you must acknowledge its use in your submission, using the cover sheet provided (this is linked from the course github page alongside the assignment brief).
Some additional remarks. Having played around with ChatGPT a bit myself, I’d add the following observations: 1) the text it produces is obviously incredibly impressive for a machine, but for an undergrad or Masters essay is quite superficial and lacks the critical engagement we are looking for; 2) its answers sometimes contains interesting or unexpected links that could be worth pursuing, particularly if you are at the brainstorming stage, but it’s often prone to fantasizing evidence that does not exist; 3) it does particularly badly with references, and frequently produces references to papers which either do not exist or which do not contain content relevant to the claim they are being cited to support. This will be extremely obvious to anyone who knows the literature who reads your essay. 4) I almost never use it for coding, because the javascript code it generates tends not to work without tweaking/correction, and unless you understand how a piece of code works it’s actually quite hard to fix it when it’s not working. The code it produces will also not be in the style we teach on the course, so it’ll be obvious to us when reviewing your assignment.
If you do use generative AI, you are encouraged to use the Edinburgh Language Model (https://elm.edina.ac.uk/), see explanation in the Appendix.
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