What counts as AI assistance?
Whatever your institution's policy says it is — there is no shared definition across institutions, and the tools people assume are exempt are often the ones a policy names explicitly.
Last reviewed 15 August 2026 · The HumanFlow team
The category is much wider than "asked a chatbot to write it". Spelling and grammar correction, predictive text, an AI-generated outline, translation, summarising a source, rephrasing your own sentence, generating code, and having a model check your reasoning are all AI assistance under some policies and unremarkable under others.
The disagreements are not at the edges either. Grammar checkers are the clearest case: many institutions have used them for a decade without comment, and some now name AI writing assistance in a way that plainly covers them. Translation is similarly contested for multilingual students, where the tool is doing something closer to access than to authorship.
This is why a general article — including this one — cannot tell you the answer. What it can tell you is where the answer lives: your institution's academic integrity policy, and the specific assessment brief for the piece you are writing, which sometimes overrides it.
If the policy is unclear, asking in writing before you submit is both the safest and the cheapest move. An answer in an email is evidence; an assumption is not.
When this answer changes
It changes between courses at the same institution. Departmental practice and individual assessment briefs frequently narrow or widen the central policy, and the brief usually wins.
It also changes when a tool changes. A writing app that added a generative feature may have moved from clearly permitted to clearly covered without any announcement to its users.
Where to go next
- Academic integrity — One identical piece of work judged under three real policy shapes, with three different outcomes.
- AI detection for students — What detection tools actually measure, and what that means for your work.
- Humanizing an AI-written essay — If AI assistance is permitted on your course, what to do with the draft.
- What a good policy looks like — Useful in both directions — it shows what your own institution's rules are missing.
Sources
One of our direct answers.