Should a student use GenAI to polish their text?

The instruction that it's ok to use GenAI to 'polish the text' seems pretty common in higher education research, from bachelors to doctoral level. I recently read this in an explanation of how someone used GenAI "I used AI tools, as is accepted academic practice, to check phrasing and suggest alternative wording." (I'm not providing the source for this because it was in the context of someone defending GenAI use and I don't want us to be distracted by this particular example).

I would dispute that it is accepted academic practice in all disciplines, but this depends on one's interpretation of checking and polishing. It is definitely accepted to use a thesaurus to suggest alternative word choices, for instance, and GenAI might offer this plus some help with choosing more common prepositions or verbs or context to make the alternative words sit better in the sentence. If you are writing in a second or third language, you might lack confidence in every single sentence. And as checking individual words is a tedious process, the temptation to do a block check and replace of the whole document is surely very, very, high. How many words need to be changed by the GenAI product for this to become more than checking and polishing? My experience in reviewing scientific papers in education is that it is very easy for a document to look polished but for paragraphs to lose their connection to one another, making the whole very difficult to read.

Here's what I suggest: the student and supervisor need to talk about what they mean by these kinds of vague phrases. Try out different approaches together with your real text, and discuss what happens to the text and if the final output is acceptable in your discipline area. Just having the conversation and practice will help you both to come up with a definition which works for your research, and will help the supervisor give more specific advice to the next student.

Reading the quote in Rachel's response, I am wondering what exactly was meant by "AI". Word has in-built spell and grammar checks, using which I would agree are accepted academic practice. Also tools like grammarly seem to be widely accepted. But while those use AI, they are not LLMs. For me, personally, acceptable "polishing" would mean to look at a text on a sentence-by-sentence basis and make individual decisions about whether a suggested word or phrase actually improves readability and the point I want to make -- or not, similarly to how one would work with the tools I mention above. Copying and pasting a whole suggested rewritten paragraph (or more!) from a LLM would, in my perception, not count as polishing any more but rather would be having a LLM rewrite. And there I worry that nuance (or even the meaning in general if I am trying to say something that isn't mainstream in the LLMs training data) is getting lost, and I also would hate to loose the feeling of ownership of my text. But I agree that this is a conversation that needs to be had between supervisor and supervisee in their specific context, and that probably also needs to be revisited as tools develop and with them our perception of what is acceptable and what isn't.