Purpose & Core Values
The broad availability of generative AI tools is driving rapid changes in both research and education. However, the fundamental values of our department—promoting individual growth and mastery, maintaining honesty and responsibility, and ensuring research reproducibility—remain unchanged. The purpose of this policy is to articulate how the Ecology & Evolution graduate program expects students and faculty to uphold these core values when using artificial intelligence.
Policy Version: 2025.1
Effective Date: February 18, 2025
-
Treat AI as a tool: Generative AIs must be treated like any other scientific tool. Use of an AI tool must always be disclosed, and any presented output must be clearly labeled to distinguish it from human contribution.
-
Required Assessment Details: If AI is used in any product submitted for assessment, you must explain:
-
Which permitted content-generation tool was used
-
The date(s) the tool was accessed
-
The specific prompts (or types of prompts) used to generate the content
-
-
Citation & Course Standards: AI usage must follow an appropriate style guide (such as the MLA Generative AI Citation Guide). Students must follow journal-specific disclosure restrictions prior to publication. Course instructors and individual faculty research advisors may also set more restrictive policies.
-
User Accountability: Community members are solely responsible for maintaining ethical scholarship; raw AI output does not automatically meet this standard. Any shortcoming in AI output becomes a shortcoming of the user's scholarly work if left uncorrected.
-
Fact-Checking: Users are always responsible for evaluating AI output and identifying errors of fact.
-
Plagiarism & Sources: Users are responsible for addressing missing citations or incomplete attributions in AI outputs. Failing to properly cite original sources or recognize prior work constitutes plagiarism, for which the user—not the AI—will be held responsible.
-
Retroactive Review: Unauthorized use of generative AI is a breach of academic honesty and may constitute research misconduct. As methods for detecting AI-generated content improve, the Graduate Executive Committee reserves the right to submit retroactive academic integrity violations if undisclosed AI reliance is discovered on major milestones (such as proposal defenses or dissertations).
-
Impact on Learning: Beyond policy violations, over-reliance on AI limits personal learning, intellectual growth, and future professional opportunities.