AI as Collaborator
The computer science capstone’s stance on generative AI tools has never been prohibition. Since the earliest capable tools became available, the course embraced them as a genuine part of how research, writing, and presenting get done — while holding a hard line on what that use has to mean for authorship.
Three guiding principles carry that line:
- Identify what’s yours as author, and what came from somewhere else. Using an AI tool doesn’t blur this distinction; it makes it more important to keep track of than ever.
- Find and cite sources for content obtained from others. This rule doesn’t change because the “somewhere else” is now sometimes a chat window instead of a journal article.
- Acknowledge the use of generative AI tools, but don’t cite them as a source. An AI tool isn’t a reference the way a paper or an expert is — it’s closer to a very capable assistant, and gets acknowledged as one.
The class policy built from those principles is short enough to state directly: embrace generative AI tools; take full responsibility for the content of your own papers and presentations regardless of how they were produced; use these tools to accelerate learning content, never to replace learning it.
That last clause is the one that actually gets enforced, and it’s enforced through Level of Expertise Dialogue rather than through policing what tools a student used. An unscripted conversation about your own work is a poor place to hide behind something you don’t actually understand — which means there’s no advantage to using AI tools to shortcut real understanding, and no need to treat their use as something to hide. The incentive structure does the work that a stricter usage policy would otherwise have to.
None of this stays fixed. Tools change, and so does the shared sense of what’s appropriate. What should hold steady is the underlying commitment: you take responsibility for what you submit, you’re honest about how you produced it, and you can speak to it yourself when asked. The AI-Assisted Workflow AI Usage Policy Development Kit is the practical exercise built around that commitment — writing your own explicit policy, specific enough to actually follow, rather than a general intention to “be responsible about it.”