Generative AI guidelines

• We encourage you to explore gen AI in a responsible and ethical way in your studies and to follow the guidance of your tutors about how you should use it.
• While there are important ethical concerns related to how some companies have produced gen AI, including environmental impact and exploitation of workers, we also see a huge rise in use of gen AI by employers and public institutions. We believe AI cannot be ignored and want to ensure you can use this technology well and ethically both for your studies now and for employment and use in public life in the future.
• Your tutors will clarify whether you can use gen AI in each assessment and how far you can use gen AI when you do need to use it.
• Like you, we are also learning about this quickly developing technology. Please help us improve how generative AI is included on your course by giving any feedback and suggestions to your student representative to raise with your tutors at the next Staff Student Consultancy Committee (SSCC) meeting. These are held once per semester for your subject. You can also provide feedback in the online module evaluation questionnaire which is made available to you via a link at the top of your module course page on Moodle in the last few weeks of scheduled teaching for the module.

Gen AI is a kind of artificial intelligence that can create human-like text, images, audio or other content when you give it one or more prompts. It does this by drawing on very large amounts of data it has been trained on and then making predictions to create content that best matches what you have asked it for.

Some ways you can use gen AI

Here are just a few ways you could use gen AI in your studies:

• Suggest ideas to help you get past that first ‘blank page’
• Suggest solutions to a problem
• Proofread text
• Create images
• Convert text into something else like an audio conversation or a presentation

You can find many other ways to use gen AI well in your studies in the resources in the Library, for example, ‘Generative AI for Students’ by David Meechan (2025)

Some issues to be careful about

You need to use Gen AI with care however as it has limitations and challenges. It can make wrong predictions and so produce false information which still looks or sounds convincing, and it can include biased content based on the data it was trained on. You should also avoid uploading highly personal, sensitive or private information to it because of how that data is used by AI companies. If material is copyrighted or owned by someone else, it is illegal to upload that content to an AI tool.

• Always be critical, ask yourself questions about the outputs from gen AI, for example, where would you typically see / hear the viewpoints in this output being expressed?
• Always factcheck, especially references suggested by gen AI, which are often made up.
• Always follow the guidance for an assignment on how you can use generative AI.
• Where your tutor has said you can upload parts of your work to get feedback to help you improve it, we recommend that you only upload that to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat from your Newman Microsoft 365 account as that has enterprise data protection controls in place.
• Never upload data that is considered confidential, sensitive or private about yourself or others to a free web-based gen AI service.
• Do not upload copyrighted material or other people’s content without their permission.
• Where your programme has professional or regulatory requirements or where you are doing a patient or client-facing placement, you must refer to the gen AI guidance provided by your school or programme. This includes specific expectations regarding, for example, clinical documentation, placement-related reflections, and assessment evidence. School-level guidance takes precedence in these contexts and must be followed alongside university-wide principles. Where this is not followed, this could lead to your action being treated as a breach of academic integrity and be dealt with as per the General Academic Regulations.

We encourage students to develop four areas of generative AI literacy:

• Understanding AI – understanding how AI works, what it can be used for, its limitations and ways to address these
• Using AI – using AI to make and do things
• Evaluating and designing with AI – being critical about what AI does, evaluating what it produces, designing content with gen AI
• AI Ethics – Understanding ethical issues related to AI and using AI ethically

For guidance on using gen AI to help you with information literacy skills such as literature search techniques, critically evaluating the quality of information and referencing, see gen AI guidance on the Library website.

Where generative AI is integral to an assessment, your tutors will share with you the level of gen AI use expected. An assignment will normally fit one of the following six levels:

• Level 1: No AI – You are not allowed to use any gen AI in the assessment.
• Level 2: AI-assisted idea generation and structuring – You can use gen AI to help you brainstorm and organise ideas, but you cannot use gen AI to create any of your final work.
• Level 3: AI-assisted editing – You can use gen AI to help you edit and improve your work, but you must include a copy of your original work without AI improvements at the end of your assignment.
• Level 4: AI task completion, human evaluation – You can use gen AI to complete specific parts of your work defined in the assignment instructions but must evaluate that gen AI content.
• Level 5: Collaborating with AI – You can work with gen AI throughout your assignment and do not need to declare its use unless required by your tutor.
• Level 6: Must use AI – You must use gen AI throughout your assessment and demonstrate how you have used it and refined your prompts.

How we check if gen AI has been used inappropriately

We do not use digital services to automatically detect whether generative AI might have been used in your work due to them not being wholly reliable. Instead, we encourage programmes to use a variety of assignments to build an understanding of your capability, and we focus on making expectations clear and helping you use gen AI appropriately.

What happens if I don’t follow the guidance on use of Gen AI for the assignment?

Where you have used gen AI to complete work that does not follow the requirements of your assignment, this is a misuse of gen AI and may lead to academic misconduct procedures being applied. We understand students will be anxious about using this new technology. First suspected misuses will be treated supportively, we will reclarify expectations and help you understand appropriate gen AI use. Repeated misuse will be treated in the same way as plagiarism as per the General Academic Regulations.

• Depending on the level gen AI assessment, you may be required to declare your use of gen AI.
• Your tutor will clarify whether this is required and how you declare gen AI. This may include adding a written declaration of how you have used gen AI, listing uses of gen AI in your references section at the end of your assignment (see Library guidance on how to reference AI use), and/or including a full copy of the original draft of your work before you used any AI.

• We recommend that you use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for university work unless otherwise advised by your tutor. This has enterprise protections for your data. You access Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat from your Newman M365 account (OurNewman > Microsoft Office).
• Sometimes your tutor will ask you to use other gen AI tools. This may be because certain tools may be better suited to a particular assignment task, or the assignment may require you to compare and evaluate different gen AI tools. Where you are given the choice to use different gen AI tools, you can usually choose to use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat if you wish. If your programme requires you to use a specific alternative gen AI tool, they will arrange access for you following approval from IT Services. You will not be asked to pay for any gen AI services for your university work.