Current Graduate Students

Read the following guide for the use of generative AI in dissertations, MA theses and capstone projects.

Graduate-level work is expected to be original and to produce new knowledge. The outcomes of graduate-level work should demonstrate the development of a skill set that includes essential research skills, analysis and interpretation, critical thinking, making persuasive arguments, and a demonstration of humanistic values, like intellectual curiosity and the use of reason. Graduate students should be able to synthetize large bodies of scholarship and identify gaps, contradictions, and tensions in that scholarship, to share and refine ideas, and to engage in scholarly debate. Reliance on LLMs as if they were authoritative is counterproductive to the development of those skills. Process is essential to producing scholarly work, and LLMs cut out important parts of the process of research and analysis, which allow one to be creative, to think through problems, and to define oneself as a scholar. Graduate-level research should rely on peer-reviewed resources, not on generative AI, which can provide inaccurate or misleading information. It’s fundamental that we take ownership of the products of our thinking. The offloading of intellectual work to generative AI is prohibited, and instead RLL encourages limited uses of LLMs that approach them critically.

• Asking AI general research questions that will lead you to peer-reviewed sources. However, while systems such as peer review are imperfect guarantors of truth, LLMs operate without any notion of truth and are therefore inherently unreliable as research tools. Consider consulting databases such as the MLA Bibliography, JSTOR, Project MUSE, Dialnet.unirioja.es, ProQuest.
• Testing hypotheses in linguistics projects. For example, “Is sentence X grammatical?”
• Research that leads to a critical understanding of the ways in which LLMs work, or an understanding of the artists and writers who work with them

• Crafting language, including translations, that will be cut and pasted into your own work.
• Conceptualization/formulating hypotheses
• Summary and analysis of literary works
• Summary of secondary sources
• Providing explanations of concepts or terminology

For doctoral dissertations, Master’s theses, and capstone research experiences, the student should provide, as an appendix, a Disclosure Statement explaining how and why AI was used, including the name(s) of AI tool(s) used for each purpose, and a statement that human review was performed. The student should be prepared to provide evidence of AI use, such as an archive of your search history, chat logs and/or screen shots upon request from the faculty member or committee evaluating the work.

Once you have completed your form, upload it using this submission form.