Artificial Intelligence: Home

Library Online Courses

The library has a range of self-study courses to support study skills from library inductions for new students, from avoiding plagiarism to finding information for your assignments. 

Introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity

This course serves as a primer for students and staff who are new to AI, explaining in simple terms what it is, how it works, common uses and applications, as well as considerations around ethics and potential dangers. It will also provide guidance on properly citing and referencing AI tools and resources in your academic work.

Avoiding Plagiarism

Learn how plagiarism is defined, how to avoid it by following good academic practice, and its consequences. 

Welcome to the Library's guide to artificial intelligence. In a short time, AI has become one of the buzzwords of contemporary life. Everyone is talking about AI, and these technologies promise great potential benefits: making your work faster, easier, and better organised, making access to information easier, and automating repetitive and time-consuming tasks. At the same time, there are lots of potential dangers, from academic misconduct to inaccurate or biased information. This guide is intended to support you in navigating the changing landscape, by guiding you to:

• Understand what AI is, what it is useful for, and what it is poor at
• Think about the considerations you need to make before using any resource or tool in the context of an academic project (whether AI or not);
  • Know how to evaluate an AI tool depending on your research and learning needs
  • Develop a framework through which to assess whether an AI tool is appropriate or necessary
  • Understand the things you need to consider before, during, and after AI use
• Understand some of the benefits and limitations of using AI to search for research materials 
  • Understand how to use AI effectively
• Know what the university policy is on AI use
• Demonstrate ethical use of AI, including proper citation of AI outputs and acknowledgement of the use of AI (where this is permitted)
• Understanding issues surrounding copyright and AI, including how AI might be violating copyright in its use of prior work, who owns AI outputs, and whether you can use AI to to analyse works with copyright
• Properly manage the information you get out of AI
• How AI can assist you in ways which relate to accessibility and inclusion

This guide is intended to address the underlying principles of ethical and effective use of AI, and, as such, it does not provide extensive information about specific AI products.

It is important to note at the outset that the university's policy on AI and academic integrity can be found here. In the section on students' use of AI, the following guidance is given:

• The general position is that you can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) but must follow any requirements set out in assessments. Those requirements may restrict or prohibit the use of AI
• Be sure to carefully read assessment instructions to understand any specific requirements, restrictions, or prohibitions
• If you use an AI you must set out why, where and how you have done so. This may be done with a clear paragraph in your submission. Please note that specific citation requirements may be given to you as part of any assessment brief, if so then follow those instructions
• Keep a good record of all interactions with any AI that you later use or rely upon for a submission. This may be via screen-grabs, or other recording techniques. Some assignments will have specific instructions around attaching any interactions, if that is the case, follow those instructions.
• DO NOT input any personal or confidential data into any AI tool
• You will be required to state if any AI has been used as part of the submission procedure.
• If in any doubt, please contact the tutor

In short, whether AI use is permitted will vary from department to department, and from assessment to assessment, depending on the knowledge and skills being assessed. It is normal that you might be prohibited from using AI in a specific assessment, but allowed to do so on a different module. You may receive specific guidance from your department on what is acceptable that is contradicted by the advice given to a friend on a different degree programme. This is likely to be because different skills and kinds of knowledge are being assessed on your respective courses. You should always closely consult the assignment brief and discuss this with the tutor if you are unsure. Where AI use is permitted, you will be required to record your use and declare the nature of it (see our guidance on this later in this guide). Remember that you are always required to engage with the material and may be asked to undertake an oral assessment or viva to prove that your work is your own if you are suspected of committing plagiarism or using AI without declaring it. As such, you should approach using AI critically and understand how to do so with rigour. This guide explains the underlying principles for doing so. 

What is artificial intelligence? 

Before you begin to consider whether artificial intelligence is the correct tool for your research needs, and how you might go about using it ethically, it is first essential to understand what artificial intelligence is. Despite the common portrayals of artificial intelligence in science fiction books or films, the term does not refer to machines which can think or feel as people do. It refers, instead, to automation -- systems which perform tasks that typically require input from a person. In this sense, the inbuilt spelling and grammar checker in your chosen word processing programme can be perceived as AI, albeit a limited and rules-based one. AI tools and assistants excel in their areas of strength because they are systems based on pattern recognition. Such systems are trained to detect patterns in large datasets and make predictions or decisions based on those patterns. An AI does not, however, 'understand' content in the sense that people do. 

One of the forms of AI which is most prominent is generative AI -- AI systems that can produce new content, including text, images, or music -- based on learned patterns. This includes Large Language Models, which work by predicting the next word in a sentence based on the huge quantities of text they have been trained on. They can produce text which appears fluent, coherent, and factually correct, but do not actually possess understanding; because their answers are based on patterns found in their training data, they are prone to errors and produce answers based on bias. 

Image: Microsoft CoPilot (2025), Image generated by CoPilot in response to the prompt 'Generate an image of a student torn between an AI assistant on a computer screen and a pile of books', 27 August.