TALAMANA · THE AI LITERACY MAP FOR ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN · Ethics & Provenance · AGE 16—20 · FACTUAL · EVOLVING
Declaring AI in your submission
Declaring a use does not make a forbidden one allowed, so know this assignment's rule.
The dilemma
Your studio submission is due tomorrow. A chatbot wrote the first draft of your design statement and an image tool produced two of your context views. Nobody asked you to declare anything, and you have not read the brief's AI clause, if there is one. Do you say what the machine did, and where?
The choices
Say nothing, and hope the question never comes. Add a one-line note — AI was used for the first draft of the statement and for two context views, both reworked by me — and let the tutor weigh it. Or go back to the brief first and find its rule: if any of these uses was forbidden, declaring it does not make it allowed; if the use is permitted, the brief may still require the note.
The consequence
Saying nothing works until the first question. After that the whole submission is under suspicion, including the parts that were yours. Declaring costs you one sentence and keeps every other sentence credible — where the use was allowed. The third route matters most: some briefs exist to test your own hand, and on those a declaration does not make the use acceptable. It only admits it. There is no rule of the form "using it is fine, hiding it is the offence". There is this assignment's rule, and you have to know it.
The case
A second-year jury in Bengaluru. A student's sheet carries a beautiful section. A juror asks how the stair was resolved. The student cannot answer, because the section was generated and never read. The problem was not that AI touched the drawing. The student submitted something they could not defend, and had not said so.
Prove it
Find the AI rule for one assignment you have already submitted. Write the honest one-line note for that work. Then sort the uses in it into three columns: permitted, no note needed · permitted, needs declaring · forbidden, so a note would not have saved it. The third column tells you what the brief was really testing.
Take it to crit
If a juror asked right now how AI touched this submission, does the student have a truthful, specific answer ready? Ask it, and watch whether the answer is specific or vague.
How it works
Schools and universities are writing their rules as you read this, and they differ: some ask for a declaration on every submission, some forbid generation in first-year studios, some permit a use without asking for a note, some say nothing yet. That is why this card is marked EVOLVING, and why the only rule that holds everywhere is to know the rule where you are. Two things are not changing. The person who signs a submission must be able to defend it. And a declaration does the same job as a citation: it tells the reader where the work came from. This card is the rule to find before you start; the Disclosure card on this map is the record you keep so that you can answer when asked.
What this idea builds on
What this idea opens up
- Nothing yet names this as a foundation.
Sources
- ETH.A
- social-impact-ethics
- UNESCO, AI competency framework for students
- Anthropic, AI Fluency Index
Open this idea on the map · The complete map · Logika · RBDS AI Lab, India · revised every edition.