Last year, across a number of subjects at UTS, GenAI declaration statements were introduced for assignments.
In our Masters of International Relations program, we found that open-ended, qualitative responses did not always provide enough information or depth of reflection from students regarding understanding the limitations of GenAI and more critical use of various tools.
As a team, we discussed our course-wide approach to navigating declaration statements for the year ahead. We developed a set of (broad) ethical considerations for students to consider, which was informed by our collective learnings from GenAI statements we gathered from students over the course of 2025, the ongoing discussions from the Faculty of Design and Society (FDS) GenAI Community of Practice feedback, as well as emerging literature on the impacts of AI across social and environmental concerns.
Our work resulted in this Ethical Considerations Guide [.docx download, 18 KB].
This guide is intended as an initial, general course guide with the view that subject coordinators can speak to it with more specificity in relation to their discipline/subject content. It also includes a newly formulated table for GenAI declarations for students, where they are asked to specify the applications of tools and their uses, as well as a reflective component on the (ethical) risks involved with using various tools.
We also emphasise that as this point, it is challenging to opt-out of GenAI as even a simple Google search will generate an AI-summary. Therefore, we ask students to also be more vigilant about where information is coming from, and encourage use of primary data and peer-reviewed sources for their studies.