AI writing tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini have exploded into the mainstream, offering powerful assistance for everything from drafting an email to writing code. For students and researchers, these tools present a tantalizing opportunity to streamline the writing process. But they also introduce a minefield of ethical questions.

Where is the boundary between using AI as a helpful assistant and committing academic misconduct? Can you use ChatGPT to polish your language? Can it write your literature review?

Green Light: Safe and Encouraged Uses of AI Tools

Think of AI in this category as a sophisticated grammar checker or an interactive thesaurus. These uses help improve the quality of your writing without compromising the integrity of your ideas.

• Improving Language and Clarity: For non-native English speakers, AI is an invaluable tool for correcting grammar, improving sentence structure, and finding more precise vocabulary. Using it to make your writing clearer and more professional is widely accepted.
• Brainstorming and Idea Generation: AI can be a great sounding board. You can use it to explore potential research questions, generate keywords for a literature search, or get different perspectives on a topic to overcome writer's block.
• Summarizing Complex Papers (for Understanding): Pasting the abstract or a section of a dense academic paper into an AI tool and asking for a simplified summary can be a useful way to aid your own understanding of complex topics.
• Formatting Assistance: You can ask an AI tool to format your bibliography into a specific style (e.g., APA, MLA), but you must always double-check the output for accuracy.

Yellow Light: Use with Extreme Caution and Full Transparency

This is the grey area. Using AI for these tasks is not strictly forbidden by all, but it requires careful human oversight, significant editing, and, in most cases, disclosure to the journal or instructor.

• Paraphrasing: While you can use AI to rephrase a sentence, you are walking a fine line. AI can sometimes paraphrase too closely to the original source or misinterpret the nuance, leading to unintentional plagiarism. The final paraphrased text must be your own work, accurately representing the source and properly cited.
• Creating an Initial Outline or Draft: Asking an AI to generate a structural outline for your paper is acceptable. However, using it to write the first draft of entire paragraphs is risky. The core arguments, logic, and synthesis of ideas must come from you. An AI-generated draft can lack the critical thinking and novel insights required for academic work.
• Literature Search: You can ask an AI for key papers in a field, but you must be incredibly careful. AI models are known to "hallucinate"—that is, invent realistic-sounding but completely non-existent sources and citations. Every source suggested by an AI must be manually verified.

Red Light: Unacceptable and Unethical Uses (Academic Misconduct)

Crossing these lines is equivalent to plagiarism, fabrication, or other forms of academic dishonesty.

• Generating Entire Sections of Text: Copying and pasting AI-generated text for your introduction, methods, results, or discussion sections and presenting it as your own is a serious form of plagiarism.
• Fabricating Data or References: Using an AI to generate data or citing sources "hallucinated" by an AI is a form of data fabrication and is a severe breach of research ethics.
• Listing AI as a Co-author: Major academic publishers (including Nature, Science, and IEEE) have explicitly forbidden listing AI tools as authors. Authorship is reserved for humans who can take responsibility for the work's integrity.
• Writing Peer Review Reports: Using AI to write a review of another author's work is unethical, as it outsources the critical, human judgment that the peer review process relies upon.

The Golden Rule: Disclosure, Disclosure, Disclosure

If you have used an AI tool for anything more than basic grammar correction, the emerging consensus is that you must disclose it. Many journals now require an "AI in Writing" or similar section in the manuscript, where you must specify which tool you used and for what purpose. Transparency is your best defense against accusations of misconduct.

The Bottom Line: AI is a Tool, Not a Thinker

Before using any AI writing tool, always check the specific policies of your university and the journal you are submitting to.

Treat AI as a powerful but imperfect assistant. It can help you polish your language, organize your thoughts, and check your grammar. It cannot, however, replace the most critical elements of academic work: your original ideas, your critical analysis, and your intellectual integrity.