Most professors will consider the unauthorized usage of Generative AI like Chat GPT for coursework to be a form of plagiarism. If you want to use AI for a project, it's critical that you clear its use with your professor ahead of time. Generative AI should only be used if there is a clear reason and the professor has approved it.
It is not recommended to use AI to find articles to cite. Generative AIs frequently hallucinate, generating realistic looking citations to articles that do not exist. Even when they do produce a real citation they often can attribute quotes or ideas to the article that were not present in it, or summarize it incorrectly. It is your responsibility to ensure that all the information in your work is accurate, and you cannot trust AI to get it right.
Any time you use Generative AI for a project, you should include an AI statement that explains exactly how the AI was used. At a minimum it should include:
Guidance on how to cite generative AIs in:
The best way to avoid an accusation of AI usage is to avoid using AI. However, there will be times that professors may be mistaken in their belief that someone has used AI inappropriately. Some rely on AI detectors, and currently no AI detector is highly reliable.
Another defense against false accusations is to turn on the version history functionality in your word processor. Most major word processing programs have this function. Using version history will track your changes to the file so you can demonstrate how long you worked on it, and it will also indicate whether you typed text naturally or copied and pasted chunks of text in.