Templates
How to declare AI use
Disclosure describes your process. It is not a citation — a generative tool has no page and no method, so anything factual it told you still needs a textbook, a handbook or a paper behind it, cited normally and read by you.
The template
Five lines. Fill in the brackets as you work rather than at the end, when you will not remember the prompts.
Declaration of AI use Tool: [name and version, and the date you used it] What I used it for: [one specific sentence] Where it appears: [which questions, sections, or paragraphs] How I checked it: [what you actually did to verify it] What I changed: [including anything it got wrong] The tool is not cited as a source for any factual claim in this work. Every source in the reference list is one I have read.
What each line means
- Tool
- Name and version, and the date. Models change behaviour between versions, so “an AI chatbot” is not enough to let anyone reconstruct what happened.
- What you used it for
- One specific sentence about the task, not the category. “Asked it to explain why the second ionisation is ignored here”, not “used it for help with chemistry”.
- Where it appears
- Name the questions, sections or paragraphs. A marker should be able to find every affected line without guessing.
- How you checked it
- The checks you actually ran. “Reworked the calculation by hand and compared” is a check. “It looked right” is not.
- What you changed
- Including anything the tool got wrong. This line is the one that demonstrates you were the person doing the thinking.
When you have to do this
Whenever a tool shaped work you are handing in. Not only when a policy demands it — a marker is assessing whose thinking produced the work, and letting them believe it was entirely yours misrepresents that, whatever the syllabus happens to cover. If your course also requires a specific form of words, use theirs.
There is a useful signal underneath the rule, though it is not a substitute for it. If writing any of these lines down would change how the work is marked, or would embarrass you, that reaction is worth paying attention to — not as permission to leave it out, but as a fairly reliable sign that the use itself was the problem. A use you are willing to describe in full is almost always a use that was fine.
And if you are unsure whether something needs declaring, declare it and say you were unsure. Nobody has ever been penalised for that.