Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guidance

AI's potential role in the application process

As our tips for completing your application and our applications criteria show, the application process is designed to help us understand how you and/or your organisation and its members and in some cases the sector as a whole will benefit from the development of your skills and knowledge through accessing an SGA bursary place.

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini have many uses, but they do not hold the experiences of you or your organisation. On their own, they will therefore only be able to give you generic answers which may not accurately reflect your circumstances, may even not be true nor relevant and, in our experience, may offer responses that we can often tell are AI generated.

Furthermore, sharing certain information with these tools may breach your organisation’s policies and could result in that information being used to train future versions of these platforms, potentially making it publicly available to future users of these tools.

Ideas for effective use of AI

We do recognise, however, that artificial intelligence is likely to become a permanent feature of our lives and work in the future and can be a very useful tool – when used correctly and in moderation.

If you do decide to use generative AI tools to support your responses to our application questions, we would encourage you to use it for the following (with caveats):

1. Structuring and planning your answer – these tools can help you organise your thoughts in a coherent format.
   • Please note – you will likely need to do this before you complete your answer in order to not share personal or sensitive information (sensitive information can relate both to you as an individual and to your organisation).
2. Understanding more about topics – With the right prompts, AI tools can very effectively provide you with large amounts of information on topics in a concise and understandable way.
   • Please note – The information that these tools provide you with may not be correct or relevant and you should cross-reference anything you go on to use.
3. Generating ideas – by providing the tool with prompts and your current ideas, it can help provide other perspectives to your own.
   • Please note – don’t share any information with tools that you do not know the consequences of sharing and make sure you follow your organisation’s own policies.
   • This is especially important when accessing these tools without ensuring that future training of the model is disabled in the settings.

The SGA's policy for acceptable use of AI in applications

If you do decide to use AI tools, please ensure the following:

1. You must tell us if you used AI to support your application along with which AI tool you used and briefly explain how you used it.
2. Consult your organisation’s policies on AI use, data sharing and wider IT use.
3. Carefully read the terms and conditions and privacy notices of your chosen AI tool. It is crucial that you understand how the information you enter will be used by that platform.
4. Do not share any personal or organisational information without serious consideration of the risks involved.
5. Your answer must be your own original thoughts. Do not copy and paste AI answers: this is plagiarism. We will stress test our application form using generative AI and applications which simply reproduce AI-generated responses will be rejected.
6. If you are using AI to generate ideas or understand more about a topic to improve your own response, please check and cross-reference any answers it provides you to ensure that it is true, accurate and relevant to the question.

If you want to find out more about AI in governance, check out the Chartered Governance Institute's resources on the topic