How to Disclose AI Assistance in a Thesis or Dissertation

A doctoral candidate uploading her dissertation to the university's submission portal finds a line she has not seen on any earlier chapter: a tick-box asking whether generative AI contributed to the work, sitting directly under the originality declaration she has signed every year of her candidature. Nothing in the department handbook mentioned it. The portal closes in six hours.

How to disclose AI use in a thesis is a narrower question than it looks, because a thesis does not work like a journal article. The declaration usually sits in the front matter, next to the originality statement, and its exact wording is set by the university rather than a publisher's author guidelines. A growing number of institutions now attach a tick-box or a standalone form to the submission process itself, which is exactly what caught the candidate above off guard.

A journal article usually has several authors and an editor checking the final text before anything is typeset. A thesis has one name on the title page and one committee deciding whether the work stands. That is part of why universities treat the statement as a formal declaration rather than a line item: a dissertation is the one document in a candidate's academic life meant to prove independent capability, and an undisclosed tool sitting inside it raises a different kind of question than it would in a co-authored paper with six people checking each other's work.

This piece stays narrowly on thesis and dissertation submission, not on journal articles or coursework essays. For how coursework rules differ from research rules, and what journals require on top of both, a wider map of university and journal AI policy covers the rest of the landscape.

Where the AI Disclosure Statement Goes in a Thesis

A thesis is a formal degree requirement, not a manuscript submitted to a publisher with its own house style guide. The disclosure statement is normally treated the same way as the originality statement or the research integrity declaration: a short, signed piece of front matter placed ahead of the abstract, rather than a line buried inside a methods chapter. A journal article's AI statement is shaped by that journal's own author guidelines. A thesis statement is shaped by the graduate school's regulations instead, which is why the wording differs so much from one university to the next.

The University of Exeter's own postgraduate research guidance is direct about where this lives: the statement belongs on the title page of the thesis, confirming whether AI tools were used and, where they were, referring to a log of that use included as an appendix. Silence counts as an answer too. Exeter's guidance, updated as recently as July 2026, treats a thesis submitted with no statement at all as a declaration that no AI was used in preparing the work.

Other universities go further and attach a standalone declaration form to the submission process itself, separate from the thesis file, the way Stellenbosch University's postgraduate AI-use declaration works. The exact format changes from one institution to the next. The timing does not: every version sits at the point of submission, not left for an examiner to infer later.

How to Disclose AI Use in a Thesis With No Set Wording

Plenty of graduate schools have not published any wording at all, and this is still the more common situation, not the exception. A university might have a general academic integrity policy that mentions AI in passing, with nothing written for the specific case of a completed thesis, or a supervisor who has never been asked the question before. Waiting for official wording that may not arrive before your deadline is not a plan.

Write the statement yourself. Keep it factual: name the specific tool, the task you used it for, and confirm that you reviewed the output against your own sources and arguments. A workable version covers which chapters involved a tool, what the tool actually did, drafting a first pass, restructuring a paragraph, checking grammar, generating code, and a line confirming you take responsibility for the final text. That's a description of what belongs in the statement, not a form to copy, because your own graduate school's submission system, once you track it down, may specify a different structure entirely.

If you are unsure who actually owns this question at your institution, the research or research integrity office is usually a safer first call than the department office, since AI disclosure increasingly sits under research conduct policy rather than under teaching and assessment regulations. A five-minute email now is cheaper than a hold on your submission later, and most offices would rather answer the question in June than discover the gap in September.

What a Self-Written Disclosure Statement Should Actually Cover

Four pieces of information do almost all the work, and they hold regardless of whether your university has a form, a tick-box, or nothing at all.

• The tool and version, named specifically rather than referred to as "AI" in general
• The task it was used for: drafting, restructuring, translating, checking grammar, or something else specific
• Which chapters or sections it touched, rather than one blanket line covering the whole thesis
• A confirmation that you reviewed the output against your own sources and take responsibility for the final text

None of this needs padding or hedge words. Two or three plain sentences do the job better than a paragraph that talks around the tool without naming it, and since a thesis's front matter is read in the same formal register as the abstract and the acknowledgements, running a drafted statement through a formality checker before it goes in is a reasonable last step, the same way you would check any other page of front matter.

Get the Statement Past Your Supervisor Before You Submit, Not After

A supervisor who signs off on a thesis is vouching for it, and an AI disclosure statement they see for the first time in the examination copy is a bad surprise for both of you. Send a draft of the statement alongside a full chapter draft, not as an afterthought attached to the final PDF. Most supervisors have an opinion on how much detail is enough, and some departments require the supervisor's written confirmation as part of the submission approval itself, which means an unresolved disagreement about the wording can hold up the submission date, not just the statement.

If a supervisor pushes back on the wording rather than the substance, that is usually a fast fix: adjust the phrasing, not the underlying facts about what you used and for what. A disagreement about whether a use needs disclosing at all is the one worth escalating early, to the research integrity office rather than settling informally, because that is the version of the disagreement an examiner is equipped to ask about later, and a private compromise is not.

This is also the point to fold the statement into whatever final pass you are already doing on the rest of the manuscript. The checklist in TextPulse's guide to proofreading a thesis before submission covers formatting, references and consistency. Adding one more line, checking that the AI statement matches what a reader would actually find in your chapters, costs almost nothing once you are already going through the document end to end.

Will Your Examiner Ask About AI Use in the Viva?

Examiners read the front matter before they read anything else, and a disclosure statement is a natural, low-risk question to open with: what did you use the tool for, and how do you know the final argument is yours. This is not an interrogation. It is closer to the question examiners already ask about any methodological choice, and a candidate who can describe the tool, the task and the check they ran sounds exactly like someone answering a question about their own sampling method or their own coding scheme.

A typical opening is closer to "walk me through how you used the tool in chapter four" than to any accusation, because the statement itself already told the examiner where to look. Treat that specificity as an advantage: you get to answer the specific question asked, on a chapter you already know well, rather than defend a vague blanket claim covering the whole thesis at once.

The answer that does not hold up well is the vague one: a shrug, or a description that contradicts what is actually written in the appendix log. Responsibility for the final text sits with the candidate whose name is on the title page. That is the same line every publisher and ethics body takes on AI-assisted writing generally: the tool is not accountable, the person who submitted the work is.

TextPulse's own explainer on using AI within academic integrity rules walks through that responsibility line in more depth, across coursework, theses and journal submissions alike, if you want the fuller picture before your own viva.

Authorship is the boundary underneath all of this, and whether a model can be an author is answered separately. Journal policies vary more than university ones, and they are compared on their own page.

The technology will keep moving faster than any single university's wording, which is exactly why the habit matters more than the policy. Write the statement before you are asked for one. Keep a running note of what you used and where, as you go, chapter by chapter. Treat the day your graduate school finally adds an official form as a formality, not a scramble.