How to write AI rules for one assignment
Most schools now have an AI policy. Almost none of those policies help a teacher decide what students may do with AI on Thursday's essay. The policy says "responsible use" or "must be acknowledged." The student needs to know whether they can ask for an outline.
The unit that actually works is the assignment. Here is how to write AI rules for one task, and three examples you can adapt.
The three-part rule
An assignment's AI rule needs to answer three questions, in this order. What may the AI do for you on this task? What may it not do? How will I see what it did?
The first two are the rule. The third is what makes it real. A rule with no way of being seen is a request, not a rule.
Start from what you are assessing
The reason a school-wide policy fails is that the same AI use is fine in one task and defeats another. Asking AI for three counterarguments is a shortcut in a task assessing whether students can generate counterarguments, and a perfectly good move in a task assessing whether students can evaluate and rebut them.
So write down, in one sentence, the skill this task is assessing. Then ask: which AI uses would let a student skip that skill? Those are your prohibitions. Which AI uses would help a student practise it? Those are your permissions. Everything else is neutral, and you can leave it neutral.
Write it for a student, not for a committee
Say it in the second person and give one example of each. "You may ask the AI to explain a source you don't understand. You may not ask it to write any sentence that appears in your essay. Example of allowed: 'What does the author mean by moral hazard?' Example of not allowed: 'Write me an introduction about moral hazard.'"
Two examples do more than a paragraph of definitions. Students learn rules by cases.
Three worked examples
Argumentative essay, Grade 9, assessing argument construction. Allowed: asking the AI to explain a concept or a source; asking it to point out where your argument is weak after you have written a draft. Not allowed: asking for arguments, counterarguments, or any text. Seen through: the process record, and a reading of which arguments appear in your prompts versus your draft.
Lab report, Grade 11, assessing analysis of results. Allowed: asking the AI to check your calculations; asking it to suggest how to phrase a finding you have already stated. Not allowed: asking what the results mean or what conclusion to draw. Seen through: the record, and the order in which conclusions appear, yours first or the AI's first.
Personal narrative, Grade 7, assessing voice. Allowed: asking the AI for feedback on clarity after a full draft exists. Not allowed: any AI text, any AI suggestion before the draft is complete. Seen through: the record, and the authorship breakdown, which for this task should be close to entirely the student's.
Make the rule visible where the work happens
A rule in the syllabus is a rule students forget. Put it on the assignment itself, where the student sees it every time they open the task. If the AI students use for the task can be told the same rule, better still: then the rule is not only stated but enforced. In Cognity, the AI rules you write for a task are shown to students in the workspace and given to the AI assistant, which follows them. Ask it for an introduction on the narrative task above and it will decline and ask you what you want the reader to feel first.
Revisit after the first submission
The first time you run a task with AI rules, some student will do something you did not anticipate, and it will be neither clearly allowed nor clearly forbidden. That is not a failure of the rule. Write the case down, decide, and add it as a third example. After two or three rounds your rules will be short, concrete, and yours.
If you want to try this on a real task, Cognity is free for individual teachers. Describe the task in a sentence and it drafts the rubric and a first version of the AI rules for you to edit.