Use of Generative AI in the Course

This is our official policy on use of AI based tools:

Academic integrity is an underlying principle of research and academic practice. All submitted work is expected to be your own. AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT, ELM) should not be used to generate written text on your assignments in Speech Processing. However, you are allowed to use these tools to identify ideas, key themes, and plan your assessment. You may also use it to improve the clarity of your writing. If you use AI software, you must acknowledge its use in your submission. 

We will give more details on how you should declare any use of AI in the assignment instructions.  From the perspective of researchers actively reviewing work in the speech technology and speech science, we can tell you one thing right now: using tools like ChatGPT may make your writing seem more scholarly to someone not in the field, but it often does more harm than good.  ChatGPT often provides text that seems reasonable unless you actually understand the field.  If you don’t actually have the mastery of the material, you may find your newly fluent text is full of subtle errors that make your marker very unhappy.  We’ve also been seeing what can only be described as pseudo-academic writing – it’s what someone outside the field might imagine academics like to read but it really isn’t!  This also makes your markers unhappy!

Whether or not you use tools to help you in your writing, you always need to critically think about whether what you’re saying makes sense, is backed up by evidence, and forms a coherent argument.