Understand → Decide → Interrogate → Verify → Account
AI literacy means understanding generative AI, deciding whether it is useful for a particular learning task, questioning its outputs, checking evidence and accounting for your decisions. Using AI is optional unless your assessment requires it.
AI can help you generate questions, test ideas and improve clarity. Your course readings, data, sources and judgement carry the academic weight.
Do not leave checking until the end. Build source checks, uncertainty flags and evidence questions into the way you prompt and write.
Use only material you are permitted to share. Personal, confidential, unpublished or other students' material may be unsuitable to upload, including to a service marketed as private.
Test your current knowledge with The Generative AI Literacy Assessment Test.
Understand what generative AI can and cannot do. It generates plausible outputs from learned patterns and supplied context. It can help explore questions and organise material, but it can also invent evidence, misrepresent sources or reason incorrectly.
A fluent answer is not evidence of accuracy. See Understanding AI.
Identify what you need to learn before choosing a tool. Would AI add value compared with attempting the task yourself, using course resources or asking a tutor? Sometimes the appropriate decision is not to use AI.
Ask whether AI would support the learning or reasoning the assessment is intended to develop, or do that work for you.
Question outputs actively. Challenge assumptions, ask what might be missing and consider alternative explanations. Compare the response with your own attempt and explain your reasoning in your own words.
A helpful prompt can improve an interaction, but it cannot guarantee reliability. See the Prompting Guide.
Check important claims against appropriate original or credible sources and evidence. Locate and read suggested sources: check that they exist and actually support the claim, with relevant context and limitations.
Citations, web access and agreement between AI systems do not establish truth. Follow the detailed verification guidance.
You remain responsible for what you submit, including evidence, argument and final judgement. Follow assessment-specific permission and disclosure requirements, and keep a record of AI contributions and the checks you completed where required.
The assessment brief or explicit staff guidance takes precedence over this general guide. Disclosure does not make prohibited use permissible. See assessment permission, disclosure and privacy.
AI can help you generate questions, practise explanations and review your own work. Your course readings, data, original sources and judgement carry the academic weight. You should be able to explain, evidence and defend what you submit.
Practice questions, brainstorming and draft feedback still depend on the assessment rules. Do not assume that a task is permitted simply because you describe it as learning support.