As students approach the new academic year, many of you will go to or return to your campuses with more than notebooks, laptops, and a list of modules. You will also have tools that can draft an essay, summarise a journal article, write code, and polish a paragraph before you have finished thinking.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is already part of student life. That is not a rumour from somewhere else. It is the finding of local research, and it is why our universities have begun to write rules about how you may, and may not, use these tools.

I write as a lecturer of undergraduate students, not as an enemy of technology. I use digital tools in my own teaching. I also mark the work that is supposed to show what you can do. A degree is a public claim: that you read, reasoned, analysed, and produced something of your own. If a machine does that work and you submit it under your name, the claim is false. Policy exists to protect that claim. Ethics asks you to protect it even when no one is watching.

Researchers at the University of Technology, Jamaica (UTech) have made the scale of this shift difficult to ignore. A study by Professor Paul Golding and Dr Tiou Clarke found that 100 per cent of students at universities and colleges, and 96 per cent of high school students, use AI tools in academic tasks, while about 87 per cent of faculty also use AI in their professional work. Professor Golding has argued that the way we teach, what we teach, and the way we assess learning will have to change. Assessment is not a hoop invented to make life hard. It is how the university, your future employer, and you yourself can tell whether the learning happened.

Local writers have been saying the same thing. Lecturer Oneil Madden wrote in an article that more effort was needed to guide students in “notions and practices of academic integrity, ethics, and plagiarism”, and later warned, with Nattalie McKenzie and Jason-Lee Daley, that uncritical use can encourage over-dependence and intellectual laziness. Others have argued that the Caribbean should not rush into AI without a policy framework and without protecting students from plagiarism and the loss of deep learning. Balvin Thorpe put the tension plainly: AI can widen access, but “the unregulated or unethical use of AI undermines the very goals it is supposed to support”.

Your first duty this semester is simple. Read the AI rules of your own institution, then the rules of each course. They are not identical, but they point in the same direction.

At UTech we try to control AI use on campus networks, we use detection software and review its academic integrity and assessment policies. If you are a UTech student, read your course outline, ask your lecturer, and treat undeclared substitution of AI output for your own thinking as misconduct. Here I must write as I would speak in a lecture room. AI does not invent knowledge out of nothing. A published letter put this well: the information these systems reproduce is “mined from vast bodies of work done by humans; art, history, stories, research findings, and numerical data”. For that reason, “it cannot be touted as fair to present material accessed through Gen AI and pass it off as one’s own”. The writer’s rule is the same rule I give my classes: Give credit when and where it is due.

When you paste a prompt and receive a polished paragraph, you are standing on other people’s labour. If you submit that paragraph as yours, you have not only broken a rule, you have taken credit for work you did not do.

Respect for other people’s work has four practical meanings this year. Do not present AI-generated text, tables, code, images, or references as your own thinking. If a course allows the tool, name it. If the course does not allow it, do not use it for the graded task. Check every source, because generative tools invent books, journal articles, and quotations, and a fabricated reference is still academic dishonesty. Protect the work of your classmates: Do not upload their drafts, unpublished data, or a lecturer’s slides into a public chatbot. Protect your own future as well. Employers are not impressed by a graduate who cannot write a paragraph or defend a method without opening a chatbot.

I will not pretend that the pressure is imaginary. Fees are high. Time is short. Some students work, parent, commute, and study in the same week. It’s ‘Juggling Jeannes and Joes’ as penned by Leonie Simms, my adult learning facilitator. A tool that offers a finished answer at midnight is tempting. Temptation is not an excuse. The education students pursue is not a receipt for tuition. It is a formation of judgement. Students attend university to learn how to ask a better question, weigh evidence, sit with difficulty, and produce work that can stand beside your name. No policy can do that for you. Policy can only tell you where the line is. You decide whether to cross it.

So this is my call to students as they enter the new academic year. Read the AI policy of your university and the statement in every course outline. If the statement is unclear, ask before you submit. Use AI where it is permitted — as a tutor and a critic, not as a ghostwriter. Ask it to explain a concept you have already attempted. Do not ask it to become the student. Cite the human sources you actually read. Cite the tool if your lecturer requires it. Never hide the help you received.

Most of all, respect other people’s work, including the work you have not yet done yourself. The degree you want is valuable only if the person who holds it can still think. Be that person. I will meet you in class ready to teach, to question, and to help you use new tools without surrendering old virtues. Meet me there with your own mind switched on.

Suzette Townsend is a marketing lecturer in the School of Business Administration at the University of Technology, Jamaica. E-mail townysue2@gmail.com.