AI Policy

Language@Internet Policy on the Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (5/10/26)

  • Authors should use Artificial Intelligence in ways that are ethical, adhere to standards of academic integrity, and do not replace or substitute human thinking or creativity. Authors are accountable for the data that they generate using Artificial Intelligence.
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  • Peer reviewers should not use Artificial Intelligence tools to generate a review or upload author manuscripts to AI tools (John Benjamins, Publishing ethics statement, 2026). 
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  • When submitting a manuscript, authors must declare their use of Artificial Intelligence to Language@Internet editors in their cover letter or in an email to langint@iu.edu.
  • When preparing their manuscript, Authors must also declare their use of Artificial Intelligence in the manuscript itself. This should take the form of a Dedicated AI Declaration Statement, which will be published as part of the article. The Statement should be positioned at the end of the body text and before any Acknowledgments.
    • The Statement might address any or all of the following:
      • Which model and which version was used (e.g., GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro).
      • How the system was configured (e.g., prompts, fine-tuning parameters).
      • What role the AI played in the research/writing experience (e.g., feedback generator, annotator, copyeditor, literature synthesizer).
      • Whether human actors designed or reviewed the outputs.
      • How limitations, bias, or ethical risks were addressed. (Allison, 2025)
    • If AI is crucial to the study’s methodology, its involvement should also be described in the methods section of the manuscript, either in a footnote or in the body text.
  • Appropriate and inappropriate uses of Artificial Intelligence in a Language@Internet article:
    • It is acceptable for authors to use Artificial Intelligence to:
      • "[help] synthesize complex literature, provide an overview of a field or research question, identify research gaps, generate ideas, and provide tailored support for tasks such as content organization and improving language and readability." The Internet and Higher Education, Guide for authors, 2026
    • Use of Artificial Intelligence to generate text, images, figures/visualizations, or data is usually discouraged 
      • "unless part of formal research design or methods,
      • and is not permitted without clear description of the content that was created and the name of the model or tool, version and extension numbers, and manufacturer. Authors must take responsibility for the integrity of the content generated by these models and tools." Flanagin, A., Bibbins-Domingo, K., & Berkwits, M., 2023
  • Artificial Intelligence tools cannot be listed as authors.
    • "AI tools cannot meet the requirements for authorship as they cannot take responsibility for the submitted work. As non-legal entities, they cannot assert the presence or absence of conflicts of interest nor manage copyright and license agreements." COPE Council. COPE position - Authorship and AI - English.
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  • Authors should review the terms of service of the AI tools they plan to use. They should opt out of any provision that grants an AI tool rights to the manuscript submission or published article/data. Also, they should not upload a manuscript to an AI tool that would use the author's work to train their models (Oxford University Press, Author use of artificial intelligence (AI)). This could lead to breach of copyright or confidentiality, plagiarism (as LLMs could generate data from the manuscript in their output), or AI tools gaining rights over an author's work.

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