My AI policy

I’ve been wondering what to allow and what to disallow in terms of AI. I decided to treat AI as basically persons and I put this in my Metaphysics syllabus:

Even though (I believe) AI is not a person and its products are not “thoughts”, treat AI much like you would a person in writing your papers. I encourage you to have conversations with AIs about the topics of the class. If you get ideas from these conversations, put in a footnote saying you got the idea from an AI, and specifically cite which AI. If you use the AI’s words, put them in quotation marks. (If your whole paper is in quotation marks, it’s not cheating, but you haven’t done the writing yourself and so it’s like a paper not turned in, a zero.) Just as you can ask a friend to help you understand the reading, you can ask an AI to help you understand the reading, and in both cases you should have a footnote acknowledging the help you got. Just as you can ask a friend, or the Writing Center or Microsoft Word to find mistakes in your grammar and spelling, you can ask an AI to do that, and as long as the contribution of the AI is to fix errors in grammar and spelling, you don’t need to cite. But don’t ask an AI to rewrite your paper for you—now you’re cheating as the wording and/or organization is no longer yours, and one of the things I want you to learn in this class is how to write. Besides all this, last time I checked, current AI isn’t good at producing the kind of sharply focused numbered valid arguments I want you to make in the papers—AI produces things that look like valid arguments, but may not be. And they have a distinctive sound to them, so there is a decent chance of getting caught. When in doubt, put in a footnote at the end what help you got, whether from humans or AI, and if the help might be so much that the paper isn’t really yours, pre-clear it with me.