Student Guidelines
Generative AI (GenAI) tools are now widely available, and many students are using them for coursework and research. We encourage all registered BU students to take the free online AI @ BU certificate course to develop strong skills around responsible AI use.
The AIDA team has issued this guidance below to BU students for the use of GenAI in their academic work. Instructors are likely to have specific AI policies for each course they teach, and those policies take precedence over these general guidelines. Students are encouraged to consult with their instructors on questions they may have that arise around AI use in their courses.
Have other question for us at AIDA? View our frequently asked questions page.
1. Critical Embrace of GenAI
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- BU supports the use of GenAI in academic and research settings with sensible guardrails in place: students and faculty are encouraged to use GenAI after educating themselves on GenAI capabilities and being mindful of the benefits and limitations of GenAI. Notably, all GenAI products, including those supported by BU IS&T, often produce false or incorrect statements. Proceed with caution and fact check any claims, assertions, or citations made by AI.
- Instructors have broad discretion to set rules on how GenAI may or may not be used within each individual course. It is your responsibility to comply with these instructions. Always consult the AI policy for the course or ask the instructor before assuming use of AI is allowed.
- To democratize access to AI for our community, BU offers all students free access to TerrierGPT, a BU-hosted platform that the most widely used GenAI models. We recommend adopting thoughtful personal use strategies that support your work but avoid overreliance on GenAI. Overreliance may affect your ability to perform work independently or to learn and retain critical concepts and methods for future use.
2. Ownership and Transparency
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- You are ultimately responsible for the validity and accuracy of any work you do. GenAI is prone to hallucination, where it offers forth incorrect information authoritatively. Always verify GenAI-assisted outputs, including facts and references.
- Disclose (by a proper reference) when you leverage GenAI tools and describe how you used them in producing your work.
- Submitting GenAI-generated or GenAI-assisted output without attribution is a form of plagiarism that your instructor will treat as an instance of academic misconduct.
3. Privacy and Security
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- Commercial GenAI tools (including paid or plus versions) do not guarantee privacy. Thus, inputting or sharing private or sensitive information through these tools (e.g., work of other students you have been given in confidence, copyrighted class materials, scientific papers you are helping review, unpublished manuscripts) may compromise privacy and violate privacy laws and BU policy.
- For academic use, we recommend TerrierGPT because it provides BU data security guarantees and complies with BU privacy policies. However, TerrierGPT is not approved for restricted data (e.g., HIPAA-regulated information).
- Your instructors do not have access to your TerrierGPT sessions and have no means of acquiring such access. BU IS&T personnel do have access to TerrierGPT data, but only on a strict as-needed basis and for complying with state and federal information security laws and enforcement actions. BU IS&T may also leverage aggregate data for platform improvements. BU IS&T will treat individual TerrierGPT session data with the same strict privacy policies that apply to your BU email.
4. Responsible and Constructive Use
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- Use of AI for course assignments in ways not permitted by the instructor is a form of academic misconduct. Always indicate where and how AI was used to generate content submitted for grading.
- We encourage you to treat AI tools as a resource that could potentially help you in studying, discover new information, deepen your understanding, and increase your academic productivity. The free online AI@BU course can teach you how to build an effective personalized tutor and additionally establish guardrails consistent with a tutor.
- As with human tutors and teaching assistants, overreliance on AI and asking every question that comes to mind may inhibit your ability to work independently and with confidence in your abilities. We recommend taking time to seek answers on your own and formulate only the most essential questions to ask.
- An AI model should not be used as a search engine. AI models are trained up to a point in the past and will not know current events. Only those products with integrated web search (Google Gemini on TerrierGPT is one) are able to access the web and reply accurately.
- As you use AI, we suggest you become informed about ethical considerations and the environmental impacts of AI (which are especially heavy during model training or through intensive use). The AI @ BU course provides exteneive discussion.
Last Revised: November 2026. AI was not used in producing these guidelines.