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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A guide to Artificial Intelligence and academic integrity for students.

Using AI

CCV and VTSU do not have institutional-level AI use policies. Each instructor sets their own policies and expectations for their courses. This means that use that is allowed in one course may be prohibited in another. Check your syllabi and consult with your instructors before you use any AI tools in your coursework.

Inappropriate AI Use

Some forms of use are inappropriate and may be violations of institutional academic integrity policies regardless of course expectations. These include, but are not limited to:

  • Cheating: Using an outside source to complete an assignment or answer test questions without permission from your instructor would be cheating. Such use misrepresents what you know and what you can do.
  • Plagiarism: You must cite anything you get from or create with AI, even if your use is allowed by your instructor.
  • Copyright infringement: Copyright law is still catching up to AI tools, so it's unclear exactly where the courts will land on this.  However, asking an AI tool to create artwork or music in a contemporary artist's style may violate that artist's copyright. It may also be a violation of copyright to feed an article into an AI tool in order to get a summary, since those tools will use submitted content as training data.

Appropriate AI Use

With your instructor's approval, you might experiment with using AI to help with:

  • Brainstorming: Try inputting some research topics that interest you and see what suggestions it has for your paper's focus. Remember, librarians can also help you define your topic and identify keywords for your search. 
  • Study aid: AI Chatbots can help you study in a lot of ways. You might have it generate some questions and then give feedback on your responses, or ask it to help explain tricky concepts. Remember, though, that AI Chatbots are prone to making things up. Check any information it gives you!
  • Summarizing a document: AI Chatbots can do a very good job of pulling out the main points of text that you submit. Be careful here! Most AI tools, especially free ones, use submitted content as training data. This means that if you don’t own the copyright to the work and it isn’t freely available on the internet, submitting it could be another form of copyright infringement.
  • Grammar and writing: Many AI tools can offer guidance and support to improve your writing if you ask for critique.