An AI statement for your syllabus

AI in this course

You may use AI tools in this course, in the ways listed here. What matters to me isn't whether a sentence passed through a language model. It's whether you did the thinking: drafting, rereading, judging, revising, and doing it again.

Solo. You write and revise it yourself, and none of the words on the page come from AI. Using AI for simple research, a spelling and grammar check, or brief feedback doesn't count, as long as nothing it generates ends up in your paper.
Draft-first. You write the draft yourself, then work through several rounds with an AI tool: it gives feedback, you revise, and it reads again. The sentences are mostly yours. The AI is a reader and an editor.

Co-writing and Directed drafting aren't allowed in this course. An assignment sheet may narrow this list for that assignment. However you work, you're responsible for everything you turn in.

AI can be a good tool for assistance with brainstorming, fine-tuning ideas, and reworking your own writing. However, you should not use AI to generate full papers or even full drafts in this course without significantly utilizing the recursive process.

I will disclose to you when I use AI, and I expect you to do the same for any submitted bodies of text you create. Put a label at the top of everything you turn in, naming the way you worked: Solo and Draft-first. At the end, add a short process note: what you wrote, what the AI wrote, who made the decisions, and how many rounds of revision it took. If you used an AI tool, also cite it in APA style: the company, the year, and the tool with its model. In your text, that's the company and the year in parentheses. Keep your drafts and your chat transcripts until the course ends. I may ask to see them.

If something arrives without a label, or what it says doesn't match the work, we'll talk before I grade it. I'll ask you to walk me through how you made it.

Why I ask for this: a citation shows that a tool was used, and you still need one, but it can't show how you used it. The Modern Language Association still asks writers to cite AI, and it now asks them to describe how they used it too, because AI output isn't a source in the traditional sense (Modern Language Association, 2025). APA asks writers to cite the tool and describe the use in the paper (McAdoo et al., 2025). The label and the note are how you do that here. They're adapted from the ones a writing teacher puts on his own essays (Howard, 2026).

My own disclosure, since I ask for yours: in putting this course together, I used [which AI tool] to [what it did for you]. I made the decisions, and the course design, assignments, and policies are mine. I did not take its output on trust, and I expect the same of you with yours. [If you didn't use AI on the course, say that here instead.]

References

Howard, E. S. (2026, September 28). How I use AI, and why I'm publishing here. https://ericshayhoward.com/essays/how-i-use-ai/

McAdoo, T., Denneny, S., & Lee, C. (2025, September 9). Citing generative AI in APA Style: Part 1—Reference formats. APA Style. https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/cite-generative-ai-references

Modern Language Association. (2025, August 13). Beyond citation: Describing AI use in your work. MLA Style Center. https://style.mla.org/describing-ai-use/

AI on this assignment: Solo and Draft-first. Label your work with the way you worked, and end it with a process note. See “AI in this course” on the syllabus.

Process: [Solo / Draft-first] · [number] rounds of revision

Process note: [What you wrote. What the AI wrote. Who made the decisions. How many times it went back and forth.]

Citing the tool in APA

Reference: [Company]. ([Year]). [Tool and model] [Large language model]. [The tool’s address]

In your text: ([Company], [Year])

For example: Anthropic. (2026). Claude Sonnet 4.6 [Large language model]. https://claude.ai In the text: (Anthropic, 2026).

Why a label, and where it comes from

A citation can show that a writer used an AI tool. It can't show who drafted, who judged, or how many times a piece went back and forth, and that's the part of writing I teach. So I label my own essays with the way I worked and end each with a note on how it went. My first essay here explains the four labels.

I'm not the first to ask for more than a citation, and the statement cites the people who got there before me. The choices about detectors come from the same reading. It also follows two corrections from Stet's column about my labels: the label goes alongside a citation of the tool, not in place of it, and the disclosure names the model and the date.

Modern Language Association (2025). MLA still asks for a citation. It adds that AI output isn't a source in the traditional sense, so writers should also describe how they used it. Beyond citation: Describing AI use in your work
McAdoo, Denneny, and Lee (2025), for APA. When AI helps refine your own writing, cite the tool and describe the use in your paper. Citing generative AI in APA Style
Weaver (2024). A short statement at the end of a paper that names the tools and says what they did at each stage. The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework
The Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition (2024). AI goes in a note, with the prompt, the tool and its version, the developer, the date, and a public link, and usually stays out of the bibliography (section 14.112). The Manual is behind a login, so I've followed McMaster University Library's guide to it.
Krishna and colleagues (2023). Running AI-written text through a paraphraser gets it past detectors. Paraphrasing evades detectors of AI-generated text
Stet (2026). A detector's result is a claim about a writer, so it should go to the writer first and be read beside their own note. A watermarked columnist
Ede and Lunsford (1990). Two kinds of collaboration, one with fixed roles and one where the roles shift, in Singular Texts/Plural Authors. It's the vocabulary behind the difference between directed drafting and co-writing.

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