**Announcement that can be shared with students in your courses
Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tool Guidelines
The purpose of discussions and assignments is for you to fine-tune and demonstrate your learning and critical thinking skills while providing you with opportunities to grow as a communicator, thinker, and leader in your workplace.
As part of our ongoing commitment to promote the development of information literacy skills for learning, we support the effective, ethical and responsible use of AI tools such as ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Grammarly, among others, at CSU Global and in your day-to-day professional life.
However, it is essential for you to understand that these tools augment your own intellectual work, and they do not replace it. Any verbatim copying and pasting of these tools' output and presenting it as your original work is considered plagiarism and constitutes a violation of the academic integrity policies.
Here are some recommended ways to use AI tools in your academic endeavors for discussion board, Critical Thinking assignments, Portfolio Projects, and the other work that you encounter in your courses:
- Research Assistance: AI can aid in topic selection, source finding, key concept identification, and exploring diverse perspectives on a subject.
- Brainstorming and Outlining: AI can be prompted to generate ideas, create outlines, and structure arguments for essays or presentations.
- Thesis/Claim Generation: AI can aid in formulating strong, clear, and arguable thesis statements or claims for written assignments.
- Summarization: AI can help distill lengthy journal articles or academic research papers into concise summaries, assisting in understanding complex materials. Any summaries used in assignments must cite their original sources (not the AI).
- Grammar and Syntax Checks: AI can proofread your work, correct grammatical errors, improve sentence structure, and enhance syntax.
- Vocabulary Enhancement: AI can suggest more precise or sophisticated word choices, thereby enhancing the overall quality of your writing.
- Feedback and Revision: AI can offer instant feedback on writing clarity, coherence, and structure, guiding students through the revision process.
- Data Visualization: AI tools can be used to create charts, graphs, and other visual representations of data, enhancing the presentation of research findings.
- Multimodal Assignments: AI can assist in integrating various forms of media (e.g., images, audio, video) into written assignments, fostering creativity and engagement.
- Accessibility Support: AI can be employed for text-to-speech or voice recognition, provide captioning or transcripts of media sources, and otherwise convert learning materials into multimodal forms, enabling more effective support for the diverse needs of learners and universal design.
Important Considerations
- Unpredictable: At the present time, AI tools typically produce unique responses to each prompt, making their output unpredictable and non-repeatable. Furthermore, their responses can't be attributed to a specific author or organization. Therefore, AI tools should not be regarded as a primary, verifiable source of information. Instead, they should be seen as tools that can assist in locating or organizing other sources, comparable to the way one may use Wikipedia.
- Misinformation: AI models like ChatGPT do not access or understand reality or check facts. They predict and generate language based on probability, sometimes providing biased results, misinformation, or non-existent sources (also referred to as “hallucinations”), necessitating the verification of all content.
- Always Verify: AI tools often struggle with accurate source citation; so once again, careful verification of any sources provided in responses is crucial.
- Limited Data: These models have been trained on limited datasets and many do not have access to current data, yet another reason why thorough verification is essential.
- Always Avoid Personal Information: Remember there are no guarantees or expectations of privacy when using AI, so avoid including any personal information in prompts.
- Rapid Evolution: It is essential to understand that all AI tools are in an unprecedented period of rapid change in their development, and as their behaviors and characteristics are in constant evolution, their output is unpredictable.
- Always Cite AI Use: When using AI tools in completing assignments, you are expected to include a statement as appropriate in a separate section of your work acknowledging and citing the specific tool(s) used and the prompt(s) you used to generate responses.
If you're uncertain about how and when to use AI:
- Consider AI as an assistant, not a replacement.
- Approach AI as you would a human assistant or coach: use it as a sounding board for ideas, source hunting, structuring help, etc., but avoid letting it complete the assignment for you (this constitutes plagiarism).
- Remember, AI can generate and synthesize information but cannot create or think critically - only you can do that!
- When in doubt, don't hesitate to ask your instructor for guidance.
By adhering to these guidelines, you can make the most effective use of AI tools to enhance your learning experience while maintaining academic integrity.
