Rules and Guidelines

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Rules set by the Examining Boards

Unless you have explicit permission from an examiner as written in the course guide, using AI to generate the content of your assignment is considered fraud (Article 16, paragraph 3 of the 2024-2025 Rules & Regulations). Examiners can request an additional oral verification of your assignment in case of doubt. Suspicions of AI fraud will be investigated by the Examining Boards in a similar way as they investigate plagiarism. Besides prohibiting this specific usage of AI tools, the Examining Boards stress a few important points.

  • First, you may use AI only to support essential academic skills like critical reflection, literature research, and scientific writing, not to replace those skills.
  • You are always held accountable for the correctness, completeness, and coherence of your (written) assignments.
  • When using AI in an assignment, you should acknowledge this usage and reflect on how it impacts your assignment. See “How do I use (generative) AI responsibly?” for more information on how to cite AI tools in your academic texts.

If you have questions about these rules, contact your course coordinator or email us at [email protected].

Guidelines for MSc Theses

The following text is included in the MSc Thesis Course Guidelines (Part A). Please note that these are minimum requirements, and that more thorough documentation is possible. For example, linking to a conversation in ChatGPT is less reliable than a hard copy of the full conversation in the appendix, as web-based links expire when the original content is deleted.

Taken from the 2024-2025 version of the MSc Thesis Course Guidelines:

3.4 Use of generative artificial intelligence (e.g. ChatGPT, BARD, DALL-E, Elicit) 

The use of generative artificial intelligence to create ready-made content in assignments is considered fraud, so it is not allowed to copy-and-paste the output of AI.

However, you are allowed to use AI as a sparring partner, and as a feedback tool for the quality of your text (e.g. as a spell checker or grammar checker). However, the use of AI is always subject to the following rules:

  • Acquiring active writing, designing and reflection skills is an important part of your thesis. The use of AI should only be in support of, not as a replacement for these skills.
  • You will always be held accountable for the correctness, completeness, and coherence of all your texts. The correctness of the output of AI is never guaranteed. AI chatbots have been known to confidently assert false claims as true. You should always critically evaluate the output.
  • When you use AI for your work, acknowledge your use and report how it affects your products.

Your thesis report should contain an appendix on the use of AI. In this appendix, you state whether you used AI for your research and report, and if so, how. In case you did not use AI, this appendix can be one sentence in which you state that you did not use AI. In all the other cases you have acknowledge your use and report how it affects your assignment. The appendix should contain a list of the prompts you used, a link to the conversation (see FAQ for ChatGPT) and an explanation of how you used the output of AI (i.e. in what way did the output of AI affect your text).