MDIA5001 Chap.11 Writing in the age of artificial intelligence
Writing in the age of artificial intelligence
The final week sets a line and defends it. The line is authorship. Generating assessment text with an automated tool is not permitted in this course, and the prohibition is spelled out rather than implied: it covers writing full or partial news stories, essays, features or scripts, paraphrasing generated output and submitting it as your own, and producing quotes, arguments or narrative structures.
The reasoning is professional rather than technological. Journalism training is built on original reporting and verification, on ethical authorship and accountability, and on the development of independent editorial judgement, and text that was generated rather than reported undermines all three. Around that line the course draws a permitted zone in four parts, each conditional on declaration.
Idea development covers brainstorming, identifying angles and audiences, and generating headline variations for your own discussion. Research support covers mapping connections between sources. Organisation covers structuring notes, summarising for your own understanding, and building interview question lists.
Language support is limited to final draft stage and to grammar, spelling and style suggestions that stop short of rewriting whole paragraphs. Four things remain prohibited even when declared, which is the clause students most often miss: generated paragraphs submitted as final work, generated news reports or features, generated quotes or invented sources, and wholesale rewriting of a draft.
Declaring is therefore not a defence. The declaration itself has real mechanics. It is a separate submission that unlocks the assignment upload rather than a file you attach, the course explicitly tells you not to merge it into your work, and an assignment whose declaration was never lodged is recorded as zero. So is any submission containing fabricated citations or invented information.
The multiplatform assignment adds its own rules for generated imagery, including a cap on how much of a video may be synthetic and a labelling requirement.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The authorship line: what generating assessment text means and why it is prohibited
- 02
The professional reasoning: original reporting, ethical authorship, independent judgement
- 03
Idea development as a permitted zone, and the limit that headline variants are for discussion only
- 04
Research support and organisation, including interview question lists
- 05
Language support restricted to final draft stage and short of rewriting paragraphs
- 06
Four uses that remain prohibited even when declared
- 07
The declaration as a separate submission that unlocks the upload, never merged into the file
- 08
What a declaration has to name: tool, purpose, extent and how it was used
- 09
The zero conditions: no declaration, fabricated citations, an unopenable file
- 10
Generated imagery in the multiplatform assignment, the proportion cap and the labelling rule
- 11
A structured ideation workflow that ends in a reporting plan rather than in copy
- 12
Why a disclosure that claims writing assistance is itself a breach in this course
Triaging eight uses against the permitted and prohibited zones
- +1Permitted with declaration: generating possible angles, since idea development is explicitly listed; building an interview question list, which sits under organisation; running a grammar and spelling pass at final draft stage, which is the narrow language support zone; and summarising a document for your own understanding, which is permitted precisely because the summary never enters the submission.
- +1Prohibited even if declared: drafting a paragraph and editing it, because the prohibition covers partial text and heavy editing does not convert generated prose into authored prose; producing a plausible quote, which is the most serious of the eight because a fabricated quote is a fabricated source; and rewriting the whole draft for style, which is named as wholesale rewriting rather than as language support. Declaring any of these does not make them permissible.
- +1The video case is the one that needs arithmetic rather than category judgement. Generated imagery may assist in a video, but the proportion of generated material is capped, and 30 seconds of a 90 second piece is a third of it, which is over the threshold the course sets. Reduce the generated segment or extend the filmed and sourced material, and label whatever remains as generated, naming the tool.
- +1Write the declaration for the permitted set in the shape the course asks for: name the tool, name the purpose, and describe the extent. Something like: 'A generative tool was used to list possible angles before reporting began, to draft interview questions, and to run a spelling and grammar check on the final draft. All reporting, interviewing, structuring and writing is my own.' Note what that sentence does not say, because a declaration claiming help with writing is itself a breach here.
Key terms
- Declaration form
- The separate submission recording what tools were used, for what purpose and to what extent, which must be lodged before the assignment upload becomes available.
- Disclosure statement
- The line inside or alongside a piece of work naming the tool used, the purpose it served and how it was applied, treated here as part of editorial transparency.
- Hallucination
- Confident output containing invented information, most dangerously a fabricated citation or source, which in this course results in a grade of zero.
- Editorial transparency
- The practice of telling readers how a piece was made, including what tools were involved, so that trust is extended on accurate information.
- Ideation support
- The permitted use in which a tool helps generate angles, stakeholders and questions before reporting begins, ending in a reporting plan rather than in text.
Writing in the age of artificial intelligence FAQ
If I declare that I used a tool to write, am I covered?
No, and this is the most consequential misunderstanding in the course. Four uses are prohibited even when declared: generated paragraphs submitted as final work, generated news reports or features, generated quotes or invented sources, and rewriting an entire draft. Declaring them does not license them; it documents them.
The course has been explicit that a student who declares having used a tool for writing has described a breach rather than complied with a policy. The permitted zone is genuinely useful and genuinely narrow: help thinking before you report, help organising what you gathered, and a light language pass at the very end. Everything that produces sentences for the submission sits on the other side of the line.
What actually happens if I forget the declaration form?
The assignment is recorded as zero. The form is not an attachment and not a courtesy: it is a separate submission, and lodging it is what makes the assignment upload available to you, so in practice you will notice its absence before the deadline if you start early and will not if you start late.
The course also instructs you not to merge the form into your assignment file, which is worth flagging because the underlying institutional template says the opposite; the course level instruction is the operative one. Two related zero conditions sit beside it: work containing fabricated or hallucinated citations, and a file the marker cannot open.
All three are administrative, all three are avoidable in five minutes, and all three override every rubric row.
Can I use generated images or video in the multiplatform assignment?
Partly, and under conditions. You may not use a tool to produce your output as such, but generated imagery may assist in creating a video, with two limits. The proportion of the video that is generated is capped rather than open, so a synthetic segment cannot dominate the piece.
And every generated element has to be declared in the accompanying document and labelled so a viewer knows what they are looking at, naming the tool used.
The labelling requirement is the ethics point rather than the compliance point: the case studies in the ethics week are both about audiences being given a false signal about who or what produced something, and an unlabelled synthetic image does exactly that on a smaller scale.
Assessment move
Decide your own policy at the start of the term rather than at the deadline, and write it down in one paragraph. Which of the four permitted zones you will use, for which assignment, and what you will never do. Students who improvise this under time pressure are the ones who end up declaring something that turns out to be a breach. Second, treat the declaration as step one of submission rather than the last step.
Lodge it as soon as you know what you used, because it unlocks the upload and because a form completed calmly is more accurate than one completed at eleven at night. Third, keep a running log while you work: tool, date, what you asked for, what you did with the output. The form asks for purpose and extent, and reconstructing that from memory a fortnight later is both harder and less accurate.
Fourth, verify every citation by opening it. A fabricated reference is a zero condition and it is the single easiest catastrophe to prevent: click each link in your reference list before you export. Fifth, use the permitted ideation zone the way the course intends, ending in a reporting plan with named people to contact and questions to ask, not in a paragraph.
Working through Writing in the age of artificial intelligence in MDIA5001? Sia is AskSia’s AI Arts and Humanities tutor — ask any MDIA5001 Writing in the age of artificial intelligence question and get a clear, step-by-step explanation grounded in how MDIA5001 is taught and assessed. Read this chapter free, then take your hardest questions to Sia.
