Biranchi Poudyal

AI-Use Disclosure Guide

How to write an honest, specific and proportionate AI-use declaration, with worked examples of good and poor disclosures.

Disclosure Guide Audience: Students, researchers, professional writers · Last updated 28 July 2026

Demonstration writing sample. Formats vary between institutions and publishers; always follow the required format where one exists.

What a disclosure is for

A disclosure lets the reader understand how the work was produced. It is not a confession and not a formality — it is information the assessor or reader needs to interpret the work correctly.

The three elements

A useful disclosure names:

  1. The tool — what you used (“ChatGPT”, “a general-purpose LLM assistant”).
  2. The task — what you used it for, specifically.
  3. The boundary — what remained your own work.

Worked examples

Good — specific and bounded:

I used ChatGPT to generate an initial outline of possible essay structures. I selected and reorganised one structure, and wrote all of the text myself. No AI-generated text appears in the submission.

Good — editing use:

I wrote the full draft myself, then used an AI assistant to suggest grammar and phrasing improvements, which I reviewed and applied selectively. The analysis and conclusions are unchanged from my draft.

Poor — too vague to be useful:

AI was used in preparing this assignment.

Poor — undermines authorship:

I asked the AI to write each section and edited the result.

The last example is honest, which matters — but it discloses substitution, not assistance. If your accurate disclosure would look like this, the problem is the working method, not the wording.

Rules of thumb