Should I make AI disclosure mandatory?

Firstly, what does it mean to make declaration of AI use mandatory? Do you mean generic GenAI chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude and Gemini? Or do you mean all tools based on Large Language Models? AI tools are buried/included in many commonly used academic IT products, so you need to be very clear about this. Here are some examples where it may not be easy to be specific:

If the task is to...

...Read and summarise an academic paper  - May the students use digital tools to find the paper and while they are writing the summary? May they use digital tools to check grammar and spelling?

...Write a coherent essay or report - May the students use digital tools to produce an outline and to make their ideas sound more academic?  May they use digital tools to check grammar and spelling?

...Carry out a complex calculation or statistical analysis - May the students use a calculator or R or other statistical package? 

...Analyse interview or survey data - May the students use nVivo or other analysis package? May they use search to find keywords?

...Prepare for a research interview - May the students use digital search tools to check legal or professional guidelines? May they look for examples on the internet?

...Develop an argument for oral presentation -May the students use digital tools to create presentation slides?

Every subject area will have more specific examples.  

Secondly, even if you can be very precise about your instructions I always counsel against making something mandatory if it can't be enforced. There is no way to tell whether students are being honest about this kind of declaration. By making something mandatory, you add anxiety for students who worry about keeping to the rules and encourage others to mislead you who think your rules are a bit dumb or who don't understand your instructions or your boundaries or just run out of time.

So, maybe you can reframe this question. Rather than asking students to declare what products they used, integrate discussion about AI use in their planning for the assessment and encourage them to think of AI products as tools they can use as part of their method for doing the work. If this is the approach, then they need to talk about the methods they considered using to complete the task, how they made their decision, and how they evaluated the contribution of the tools to their finished product. This way, you are normalising discussion about these products, their effectiveness and their ethical and environmental implications. You can use relevant examples from the list above as a starting point for discussion, for instance.

This is a really good and practical paper about academic integrity which might help to think about different ways to frame 'cheating':

Ellis, C., & Murdoch, K. (2024). The educational integrity enforcement pyramid: a new framework for challenging and responding to student cheating. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 49(7), 924–934. https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2024.2329167

And if you have time, this is a great book:

Lang, J. M. (2013). Cheating lessons. Harvard University Press.

Maybe it would be helpful to try to write your own AI disclosure for a work day to develop a feeling for what it means in practice. Today, for example, I used AI to remove the background of an image that I wanted to use on a slide, and to proof-read a text I had written in a foreign language (both good uses of AI in my book). I forgot to add "-ai" to a google search, so I read the start of the AI summary before moving on to the documents I had originally been looking for (usually I avoid AI summaries because I am trying to get to the original source). I released an email from the quarantine folder that it had been placed in based on some AI (there is nothing I can do about the spam filters that the university puts in place, except trying to train them to what kind of messages I consider spam vs want to see). And I looked through my LinkedIn feed "most relevant first", meaning the order in which I saw things was set by some AI (usually I read "most recent first", but sometimes it is nice to get an overview over what is going on on LinkedIn, even knowing that the overview is biased in ways I don't know). If a reflection of this sort turns out to be meaningful to you, maybe it is something that you can start doing and discussing with your students, too. Talking about these things openly and developing a shared understanding of what is and isn't good use of AI is, in my opinion, the much much better approach...

To add to what Rachel wrote about adding unnecessary stress about something you cannot enforce anyway: several recent studies have shown that students who follow instructions and disclose AI use risk getting lower grades despite doing exactly what they were told to do (Tan et al., 2025; Luo & Dawson, 2026). Due to this very real risk, many students, especially those that use AI a lot, rarely or never disclose their AI use even when it is required (Vetter et al., 2025).

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Luo, J. (Jess), & Dawson, P. (2026). Exploring value judgements in grading: will teachers mark down student work assisted by GenAI, and should they? Studies in Higher Education, 51(9), 1970–1984. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2025.2552825

Tan, X., Wang, C., & Xu, W. (2025). To disclose or not to disclose: Exploring the risk of being transparent about GenAI use in second language writing. Applied Linguistics, amae092.

Vetter, M., Farag, I. M., Jiang, J., Lucia, B., & Silvestro, J. (2025). The Hidden Cost of Disclosure: A Multi-institutional Study on Undergraduate Students’ Generative AI Usage and Faculty Accusations. Available at SSRN 5755762.