Authorship

The issue of who actually created a piece of work has been challenging the higher education sector since ChatGPT 3 was released in November 2022. How can we tell whether a student actually completed the work they submitted for assessment? Should we allow students to carry out research using GenAI tools?

If you claim authorship of a piece of work in any format, then you are saying that you did the work. In university assessment, this is important, because we are judging students’ knowledge and skills using that work, and we need to know that they did it themselves. We also expect them to use a variety of sources to expand their knowledge. GenAI tools might be one of these sources, if we are able to address the problems with them which have already been mentioned in this module. We will need to make clear decisions about the difference between using the tools in learning and teaching and submitting work which has been partially or fully generated from a GenAI tool. We will return to this question in module 3.

Summary: Legally, you are considered the author of work that you produce, whatever tools were used to support the process. You and your students should continue to cite work in the usual way. It is strongly recommended that you identify outputs from GenAI tools in any materials you produce. I wouldn't recommend citing a GenAI tool output, since it is not reproducible. Instead, refer to the use of such tools in any description of the methods you used.