Citing and declaring AI use

What is coming for them

A student who leaves your school for a university, a college or a professional course will meet a policy on AI use, and most of those policies now require a declaration: a statement, with the work, of what tools were used and for what. Some institutions ban use on some tasks; almost all require honesty about it. A student who has never written a declaration, and who thinks of AI use as something to hide, arrives at the wrong starting point.

The disclosure line from the earlier lesson (tool, purpose, what changed) is the school version of this. The university version is longer and has conventions, and teaching them in the last two years of school is a small, concrete service.

The declaration

A declaration is a statement of use, separate from the references. It says what was used, for what, and what remains the student’s own. The check question’s case:

I used Gemini to generate a possible outline for this essay and used two of its five suggested sections. The argument, the reading and every sentence are my own. I used the same tool to check grammar and punctuation after the final draft; it suggested twelve changes and I accepted nine.

Specific, short, and it tells the reader what they need to know. The reader can now judge the essay as an essay whose structure was partly suggested and whose prose is the student’s. That is different from an essay where the argument was generated, and the declaration is what lets the reader tell.

The declaration is not a confession. Teach it as the same act as a bibliography: the reader is entitled to know what the work rests on.

The conventions, briefly

The major style guides added guidance in 2023, and they differ, which is itself a thing students should know.

• APA treats generated text you quote as something to cite in text and in the reference list: the company as author, the model and version, the date, and the prompt described in the text. It also expects a description of how the tool was used in the method or introduction for research writing.
• MLA treats generated content as a “container” (the prompt as the title of the source, the tool as the container, the date) and says to acknowledge any use that shaped the work, not only quoted text.
• Chicago uses a note: the tool, the company, the date, and the prompt; and says generated text should not appear in the bibliography as a source.

None of them treats the model as an author, because an author can be responsible for a claim and a model cannot. That principle is the thing worth teaching; the formats will change and a student can look them up.

What to declare

A useful rule for students: declare anything that, if a reader found out later, they would feel they should have been told. That covers an outline, a first draft, a translation, a summary of a source they did not read in full, a set of counter-arguments, code, a diagram. It does not cover a spelling check or a dictionary lookup, and the class policy’s exemption list says so.

And a corollary: if a student would be embarrassed to declare a use, that is a sign the use was not permitted at the task’s level, and the time to find that out is before submission.

Teaching it

Require the declaration on every Level 2 task from Class 10 upward, in the school format. Show two or three good ones. Mark it as present and adequate, never for content: a student who declares heavy use on a Level 2 task has done nothing wrong, and marking the declaration down would teach them to hide next time.

Then, once, have students write the declaration for a piece before they start it: a plan of what they intend to use the tool for. Comparing the plan with the final declaration is an exercise in noticing how use creeps, and it is a better lesson on judgement than any rule.

The unsettled question

Underneath all this is a question nobody has answered: when a student prompts, selects, edits and arranges text that a model produced, who wrote it? Copyright offices in different countries have taken different positions on whether such work can be owned at all. Universities differ on whether declared heavy use is acceptable. Journals differ on whether a model can be acknowledged. A student should know that the adults have not settled this, that the rules they meet will vary by institution and by year, and that the one stable thing is the declaration itself: say what you did, and let the reader judge.

The honest limit

A declaration is only as honest as the student, and a student who generated the whole essay can declare a grammar check. The declaration is not a detection tool and was never meant to be. Its value is to the honest student, who now has a normal, expected way to use the tool openly, and to the reader, who is told what they are reading. For the other case, the rest of this block applies.