The University of Waterloo Teaching and Learning Conference (UWTL) is committed to ensuring that Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is used ethically and with integrity. This extends to of all its participants (proposal submitters, reviewers, attendees). We are aligned with the Tri-Agency’s position, which stipulates that “privacy, confidentiality, data security and the protection of intellectual property must be considered and prioritized in the development and review” (Government of Canada) of scholarly work.
Purpose:
This protocol outlines the principles and guidelines for the ethical use of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) at UWTL. It aims to ensure that when AI technologies are used, they are integrated in a responsible, transparent, accountable, and fair manner. GenAI was used to draft this policy (see statement below).
Authorship:
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GenAI tools can be used for idea generation, to build a corpus of secondary sources, and/or to proofread your work.
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GenAI must not be used to conduct the analysis of your data or to create your presentation or abstract.
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You must always disclose use of AI (akin to the use of other research tools like NVivo, SPSS, and R), detailing how it was used, the prompt you put in, and the nature of the content it generated. See the Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) framework. If you intend to publish your presentation as a scholarly article, confirm the journal’s GenAI policy early on, as certain journals entirely forbid it, or forbid certain uses.
Proposal review:
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Reviewers cannot use GenAI to evaluate the quality of conference proposals. Reviewers must read proposals fully and write the content and argument of their reviews by themselves.
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Reviewers should never upload a submitted proposal or any part of it into a non-privacy preserving generative tool as this may violate the authors’ confidentiality and intellectual property rights, and, where the proposal contains personally identifiable information, may breach data privacy rights.
This confidentiality requirement extends to the peer review report, as it may contain confidential information about the proposal and/or the authors. For this reason, neither reviewers nor UWTL staff may upload peer review reports into a non-privacy preserving generative tool.
When in doubt, email us!
The authorship section has been adapted from The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Submission Guidelines and proposal review section from the Association for Computational Linguistics’s Policy on Publication Ethics.
Reference
Government of Canada. (2024, April 10). Draft guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in the development and review of research grant proposals. Canada.ca. https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/interagency-research-funding/policies-and-guidelines/use-generative-artificial-intelligence-development-and-review-research-proposals/draft-guidance-use-artificial-intelligence-development-and-review-research-grant-proposals
Artificial Intelligence Disclosure Statement: Artificial Intelligence Tool: ChatGPT v.4o and Microsoft Copilot (University of Waterloo institutional instance); Conceptualization: ChatGPT was used to research “Common Elements of GenAI Use Policies for Scholarly Publications and Conferences”; Information collection: I used ChatGPT to find relevant journal articles and other sources; Writing – Review & Editing: Grammarly and ProWriting Aid were used to provide sentence level revisions.
