Pretending nobody in this industry touches a language model would be a lie, and promising you a machine wrote nothing at all is a claim we could not enforce. So the line is drawn task by task instead, with what happens if a specialist crosses it.
Eight jobs that go into a piece of work. Select one to see the rule, why it is drawn there, and how it is enforced.
Never generated. The thesis, the line of reasoning and the decision about which authorities matter are the specialist’s own, developed against an outline a manager approved.
This is the thing you are paying for. A generated argument is confident about the wrong things, and neither the specialist nor we could defend it if asked.
Never generated, and never lightly edited from a generated draft. The sentences are written by the person credited with writing them.
Generated prose is fluent and hollow — it hedges in the wrong places and cites in patterns markers now recognise. It is also the failure mode a detector is most likely to flag.
Search and discovery tools are allowed, including AI-assisted literature search. Deciding what to cite, and reading it, is not delegable.
Discovery is a librarian’s task and tools are good at it. Judgement about relevance and quality is not, and an unread source is the fastest route to a fabricated citation.
Permitted as a reading aid for the specialist’s own use. A generated summary may not be paraphrased into the piece as if it were a reading of the source.
Reading fifty papers is slow and tool summaries genuinely help triage. But a summary of a summary loses exactly the nuance an examiner is testing for.
Allowed without restriction. Your word processor does this too, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Correcting a comma splice does not change whose argument it is. Refusing spellcheck would be a marketing position, not an integrity one.
Allowed. Reference managers and formatting tools are standard practice in every university.
OSCOLA punctuation is a mechanical task with a right answer. Human effort is better spent on whether the authority is the right one.
Allowed for a specialist working outside their first language, at sentence level. Not allowed as a route to writing a piece in one language and delivering it in another.
Machine translation of a whole document produces text that reads as translated, and reads as generated to a detector.
Statistical software and code assistants are allowed as tools. Choosing the test, interpreting the output and reporting it honestly are the specialist’s work.
Nobody hand-computes a regression. But a tool will happily interpret a result the data does not support, and overclaiming is the commonest fault in quantitative write-ups.
Detectors are unreliable in both directions, and anyone selling you a guaranteed score is selling you something they cannot deliver.
Six undertakings about your data specifically, separate from the confidentiality policy.
Your brief, uploads and delivered files are never used to train or fine-tune any model, by us or by a supplier acting for us.
Specialists may not paste your brief, files or identifying details into a consumer AI service. This is a panel condition, not a suggestion.
Where a tool is used operationally, training-data use is contractually excluded and the supplier is named in the privacy policy.
The specialist never sees your name, email or institution — so even a mistake could not associate the work with you.
Files sent to a detector are submitted with retention disabled where the tool supports it, and never added to a repository.
Ask and your files are deleted within 30 days, no reason required, under the privacy policy.
Not our decision to make for you, but here is what we would tell a friend.
Each of these has been suggested to us, and each would sell.
Possibly, in the categories marked "allowed" on the list above — spellcheck, reference formatting, literature search, statistical software. Never for argument, analysis or prose. If you would rather no tool touched your order in any capacity, say so on the brief and we will staff it accordingly and note it on the file.
Because it would not be true unless we also banned spellcheck and reference managers, which no serious writer works without. A promise that specific is either false or means less than it sounds, and we would rather publish the actual line.
Yes. Ask your manager and it is recorded as a condition of the brief. The specialist works without any AI-assisted tool, and the piece takes slightly longer — usually a few hours on a standard essay.
Three ways, none perfect: the detection report on the delivered file, a second reader who can question any claim in the piece and does, and the outline agreed before drafting. A generated draft rarely matches an outline it was not built from. Where we find one, the arrangement ends.
No. Specialists are contractually prohibited from pasting your brief or files into consumer AI tools, and the operational tools we do use exclude training-data use by contract. The processor list is in the privacy policy.
It affects what you can do with the work, which is covered in the plagiarism policy — read that one too. As to us: our specialists write the pieces, and if you need to state on a declaration that no AI generated the content of a piece we supplied, that statement is accurate.
The whole cost structure of this business is people reading and writing. That is the simplest reason to believe the policy above.