AI and your dissertation meet under different rules from coursework. A dissertation or thesis is examined as your own research, so universities that let a student use a chatbot freely on an essay often want a supervisor's approval, a signed declaration and a record of prompts before it touches a thesis.
This guide, published by EdCitation, reads the dissertation and research-degree rules of ten universities in seven countries, at source, on 26 September 2026. For the general case, read should you disclose AI use and how to declare AI use in an assignment; this guide covers only the thesis.
EdCitation never writes any part of a dissertation. Where AI tools have been near the writing, Verify references checks every entry in the list against the publishers' records, free, and Check your paper reads your handbook's instructions into a checklist.
What does each university allow in a dissertation?
Each of the ten provides for some declared use; they differ on the starting point, on who says yes, and on how far editing may go. The table sets out each rule as its own page states it.
| University | Starting point | Who approves | Declaration, and where | Research data |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| British Columbia (Canada), graduate | Substantive use needs approval; editing broadly acceptable | Supervisor and committee, in writing | Preface: each tool and purpose, or none used | Ethics approval and informed consent |
| Georgia (US), graduate | Prohibited unless authorised | Advisory committee | A statement in the thesis | Not addressed |
| King's College London (UK), doctoral | Permitted within the guidance | Supervisors, recorded in minutes or email | Submission form, one of two statements | Approval before any upload |
| Birmingham (UK), doctoral | Editorial help only unless authorised | Explicit authorisation; supervisor before any upload | Acknowledgements | Others' work only with permission |
| Sheffield Hallam (UK), research degrees | Limited; no concept development | Supervisors, always | Candidate declaration, one of two statements | No personal data |
| Manchester (UK), research degrees | Not set in the presentation policy | Not set there | Optional preliminary page, outside the word count | Not set there |
| Queensland (Australia), PhD and MPhil | Consult the advisor | Advisor consulted | Table in the preliminary pages | No sensitive or confidential data |
| Cape Town, Commerce (South Africa), honours to PhD | Spelling and grammar only unless the department allows more | The department, not the supervisor | Compulsory form at the front | Transcription with ethics clearance |
| NUS Psychology (Singapore), honours | Generally permitted | Discussed with the supervisor | Methods or appendix, with prompts | Not addressed |
| ETH Zurich (Switzerland), theses during studies | Set with the supervisor | Supervisor | Signed declaration of originality | Not addressed |
Where the line on editing falls
This is the widest disagreement. King's College London (2025) lets doctoral students use AI to rewrite, rephrase or paraphrase parts of the thesis so that their meaning is not lost to the standard of their English. The University of Birmingham (n.d.) allows spelling and grammar fixes and shorter sentences with the content unchanged, but not developing ideas, translating, or cutting to the word limit. Sheffield Hallam University (2025) allows help with clarity but not rewritten paragraphs or translation. Cape Town's Commerce Faculty always permits copy-editing, and clarity editing only where the department authorises it. Your own university's rule is the one that counts. Proofreading and editing a dissertation covers the proofreader rules alongside these.
What they forbid
Where a policy lists what is forbidden, AI-written text, arguments or analysis presented as your own comes first: Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam and Cape Town all say so outright. King's, Birmingham and Sheffield Hallam also forbid using AI to correct facts, and the Cape Town framework calls fabricated or unverified references misconduct and bars pasting AI summaries or citations into the dissertation (University of Cape Town, 2025).
Who has to approve AI use in a thesis?
Usually your supervisor or committee, and in writing; at one faculty, nobody below the department. The University of British Columbia (n.d.-b) treats a planned use like any other method: the supervisor and committee approve it, ideally when the research proposal is approved, and the agreement is written down. The University of Georgia Graduate School (2024) is stricter, classing AI in a thesis or dissertation as unauthorised assistance unless members of the advisory committee authorise it for a set scope.
Cape Town's Commerce Faculty goes the other way: supervisors may explain the departmental rules but not permit anything beyond them, and where a department has none, nothing beyond spelling and grammar software is allowed. At ETH Zurich (n.d.) the option ticked on the signed form is chosen in consultation with the supervisor. The NUS Department of Psychology (2025) starts from the other end: use for research is generally permitted, and supervisor and student discuss where it would help or harm.
Get the approval in writing whatever your university says: King's asks for it in the minutes of a supervision meeting or an email. Our guide to working with your supervisor covers keeping that record.
What does a thesis AI declaration say, and where does it go?
It names each tool and what it did, or says that none was used, and it goes wherever your regulations put it: the preface, the preliminary pages, the acknowledgements, a signed form, or a methods appendix.
The wording, at five universities
- King's College London: the submission form, signed by student and supervisors, offers two statements: no part generated by AI (grammar and spell checking allowed), or AI used to rephrase for the standard of English, with the tools named and the words still the student's own.
- Sheffield Hallam: "no AI tools were used", or use at level 2 of its own AI Transparency Scale, naming each system, its address and what it did.
- Queensland: a table under "Use of Artificial Intelligence" of tool and version, purpose, one or two indicative prompts, and chapters affected; most theses, the template says, need five to ten rows at most (University of Queensland, n.d.).
- Cape Town, Commerce: tool, version, purpose and extent, and a promise that prompt records are kept for inspection.
- Manchester: an example sentence headed "Generative AI Disclosure", naming the tool and what was done with it (University of Manchester, 2026).
Where it goes, and whether "none" must be said
UBC puts it in the Preface, Queensland in the preliminary pages, Birmingham in the acknowledgements (the tool, the editorial remit it was given, and confirmation the remit was kept), and NUS Psychology in the Methods section or an appendix, with prompts and outputs attached. Birmingham also wants an AI-made illustration declared in its caption.
Most ask for a statement even when you used nothing: UBC, Queensland, Cape Town, King's, Sheffield Hallam and ETH all build the "no AI" case into the form. Manchester lists its declaration among the optional preliminary pages. Even two UBC pages differ: the thesis structure page speaks of AI not "deliberately" used (University of British Columbia, n.d.-a). Follow the page your graduate school links from its submission instructions.
What will examiners and the viva ask about AI?
What they always ask, and an answer that came from a chatbot shows. King's College London (2025) lists questions such as discussing a cited source in detail and saying what gap the project fills, and warns that heavy AI use can leave a candidate unable to answer. Sheffield Hallam makes the same point about the viva voce: text rewritten into your own words is still hard to defend if you never understood it.
Keep the record
Birmingham tells research students they may be asked in the viva how AI supported the research, and to keep records of what the tools produced and how it was used. Cape Town requires prompt logs from every student and lists drafts, prompts, outputs and verification steps as the evidence it may ask for.
What examiners may not do
King's forbids its examiners to upload any part of a thesis into an AI tool or to use external AI detection software on it, and asks them not to assume AI use from a student's English. Cape Town's framework calls detection tools unreliable, never the sole evidence of misconduct, and says the university would discontinue the AI score from 1 October 2025; concerns go through drafts, records and oral explanations, and the award waits for the outcome. UBC says unapproved use, even cited, can mean required changes or a thesis not approved for defence.
Can you put research data or participants' words into an AI tool?
Not without your supervisor's agreement and an ethics approval that covers it, and at some universities not at all if the data identify anyone. Sheffield Hallam forbids research students to upload personal data or anything that could identify a person, directly or indirectly; data must be fully anonymised first, and a breach may be treated as research misconduct as well as a data protection breach.
UBC goes further on informed consent: participants' data needs ethics approval before it goes into an AI tool, and participants must understand the tool well enough to consent, including whether their data can be removed. It adds that an open AI tool is not appropriate for Indigenous data restricted to its community. King's requires approval before any part of a project is uploaded, and warns that non-disclosure agreements and ethics approvals may forbid it outright.
King's and Birmingham both point students to Microsoft Copilot used through their university account, which they say does not keep or train on inputs, while saying this reduces the risk without removing it. Birmingham adds copyright: upload other people's work only if you have permission or it is out of copyright. Cape Town allows automated transcription of the student's own data where ethics clearance covers it, and AI-proposed themes in qualitative data only if the student reviews and interprets them independently. Queensland's template is shortest: never put sensitive or confidential data into an AI tool. Our guide to research ethics approval for a dissertation covers the application itself.
How do you use AI in a dissertation without breaking the rules?
Work in this order, from the first meeting to the week you submit.
- Find your graduate school's or department's thesis AI rule, not the coursework policy.
- Read it into a checklist with Check your paper, then read the rule itself in full.
- Agree with your supervisor or committee exactly which tools, for which tasks, and get the agreement in writing.
- Before any data, transcript or draft goes into a tool, confirm that your ethics approval and data agreements allow it.
- Keep a log of prompts and outputs from the first use, as Cape Town requires and Birmingham advises.
- Never take a reference, a fact or a summary of a source from a chatbot without reading the source; find it with Find sources and build the entry with Cite a source.
- Before each draft goes to your supervisor, run the reference list through Verify references.
- Write the declaration in the wording and place your regulations set, including the "none used" statement if that is the truth.
Why check the references where AI was near the writing?
Because chatbots invent them, and a thesis carries more references than anything else you will write. Walters and Wilder (2023) had ChatGPT write 84 short literature reviews and checked the 636 citations: 55% of GPT-3.5's and 18% of GPT-4's were fabricated. UBC and Sheffield Hallam both name invented citations as a risk. Why AI tools invent references explains how it happens.
We ran four references through Verify references on 26 September 2026: three real papers, including Walters and Wilder's, and one we invented for the test, "Harrington, L. M., & Osei, K. (2023). Examiner perceptions of generative AI in doctoral theses", given a real journal and plausible pages. The three real ones came back verified, each with the reason "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches." The invented one came back not found: "No publisher's or registry's record matches this reference." A supervisor reading a list of two hundred would have no reason to stop at it.
How EdCitation helps with AI and your dissertation
EdCitation is the best tool for proving a dissertation's references are real, because it looks every one up in the publisher's record and never writes one, which is the check the policies above leave to you; the invented entry above reads as well as a real one, and only a record lookup told them apart. EdCitation never writes, rewrites or paraphrases any part of a dissertation.
Verify references is free with no account: paste the list or upload the whole dissertation, and each entry comes back verified, doubtful (shown as "check this") or not found, with retracted papers flagged. A source it could not reach is shown as "could not check", never as not found, and with the whole file uploaded every in-text citation is matched to the list and every entry back to the text. Find sources searches about 300 million published works by topic or by the claim a sentence needs, and Cite a source builds the entry from a DOI, title, PubMed ID or ISBN in APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18 author-date, Harvard, IEEE or Vancouver, screened for retraction.
Check your paper reads a handbook's instructions into a checklist, free, each rule beside the sentence it came from. We gave it the Cape Town Commerce framework. It found no rule it could test, noting that a paper "would be checked against the APA 7 student paper", and listed 30 passages under "What it asks you to do, which no rule can test", the front-matter declaration and prompt logs among them. It also listed the title and a section heading as things asked, cut one sentence off after "and the UCT", and left out central lines, including "No marks will be awarded for AI-generated content per se" and the uses not permitted. An AI policy is judgement more than word limits and fonts: use the checklist as a start and read the policy yourself. Judging the dissertation against a checklist, with quotations from your text, is Theoretics QA, part of Max at $24 a month.
In the dashboard, References from a file keeps the dissertation in My papers so each run shows what changed: three checks a month free, no limit with Pro at $8 a month. Check AI, also Pro and run on credits with the cost shown first, labels each passage AI-written, AI-assisted or human with its score, shown only to you. No score is proof of anything, and another detector, your university's included, may read the text differently. Pricing has the plans.
Quick questions
Can I use ChatGPT for my dissertation?
Only as your university's thesis rule and your supervisor allow. Birmingham, Sheffield Hallam and Cape Town's Commerce Faculty forbid using ChatGPT or any tool to write the thesis's arguments or content, and Georgia requires the advisory committee's authorisation for any use.
Do I need an AI declaration if I used no AI?
At many universities, yes. UBC, Queensland, Cape Town's Commerce Faculty, King's, Sheffield Hallam and ETH Zurich all ask you to state that none was used, in the wording they set.
Will examiners run an AI detector on my thesis?
King's College London forbids its examiners to use external AI detection software on a thesis, and Cape Town's Commerce Faculty says detection scores may not be the only evidence of misconduct. Other universities' practice was not stated on the pages read, so ask your graduate school.
Can I paste interview transcripts into an AI tool?
Only if your ethics approval, consent forms and supervisor allow it. Sheffield Hallam forbids uploading anything that could identify a participant, and UBC requires ethics approval and consent that understands the tool.
How do I check that AI has not slipped a fake reference into my thesis?
Look every entry up in its publisher's record. Verify references does this for a whole list, free, and marks an entry no record matches as not found.
References
- ETH Zurich. (n.d.). Declaration of originality. https://ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/main/education/rechtliches-abschluesse/leistungskontrollen/declaration-originality.pdf
- King's College London. (2025). Generative AI: Guidance for doctoral students, supervisors and examiners. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/about/strategy/learning-and-teaching/ai-guidance/doctoral-assessment
- NUS Department of Psychology. (2025). Guidelines on AI use for research projects and theses (Version 1.0). National University of Singapore. https://fass.nus.edu.sg/psy/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2025/08/Guidelines-on-AI-Use-for-Research-Projects-and-Theses.pdf
- Sheffield Hallam University. (2025). Use of generative AI in assessments: Guidance for postgraduate research students (Version 1.1). https://www.shu.ac.uk/-/media/home/myhallam/university-life/rules-and-regs/research-regulations/use-of-generative-ai-in-assessments---guidance-for-pgr-students---september-2025.pdf
- University of Birmingham. (n.d.). Guidance on the use of GenAI for thesis writing by postgraduate research students. https://intranet.birmingham.ac.uk/student/libraries/research/thesis/genai-thesis-pgrs.aspx
- University of British Columbia. (n.d.-a). Structure and style of theses and dissertations. Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. https://www.grad.ubc.ca/current-students/dissertation-thesis-preparation/structure-style-theses-dissertations
- University of British Columbia. (n.d.-b). Use of generative AI. Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies. https://www.grad.ubc.ca/current-students/student-responsibilities/use-generative-ai
- University of Cape Town. (2025). Framework for the use of artificial intelligence in research dissertations. Faculty of Commerce. https://commerce.uct.ac.za/sites/default/files/media/documents/commerce_uct_ac_za/50/ai-use-in-dissertations-commerce-faculty-position-december-2025.pdf
- University of Georgia Graduate School. (2024, January 18). Policy on use of generative AI in theses and dissertations. https://grad.uga.edu/policy-on-use-of-generative-ai-in-theses-and-dissertations/
- University of Manchester. (2026). Presentation of theses policy. https://documents.manchester.ac.uk/display.aspx?DocID=7420
- University of Queensland. (n.d.). Thesis preliminary pages template [Word template]. Graduate School. https://my.uq.edu.au/files/11614/TEMPLATE-university-of-queensland-thesis-official.docx
- University of Queensland Library. (2026). Artificial intelligence (AI): Support and resources for Higher Degree by Research students. https://guides.library.uq.edu.au/research-and-teaching-staff/support-higher-degree-research-students/artificial-intelligence
- Walters, W. H., & Wilder, E. I. (2023). Fabrication and errors in the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT. Scientific Reports, 13(1), Article 14045. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-41032-5