Academic Integrity Policy

All students are reminded that they are expected to adhere to the academic integrity policy for any course at Cornell. While academic integrity cases are extremely rare for this course (it has the lowest number of violations for any course in the CS department), they do occasionally happen.

Copyrighted Material

The primary concern in this course is the improper use of copyrighted materials. You may not use any material – such as software libraries, art, or music – that prohibits Cornell from distributing your game non-commercially. Improper usage of copyrighted materials is a violation of the code of academic integrity, and will be treated as such.

This is particularly important if you use the Newgrounds Audio Library to add audio and music to your game. You must follow the licensing terms for any material that you use. Most of the time, this requires credit in your game. In that case, you must credit the rights holder in both you game manual and in the game itself.

Artificial Intelligence Tools

Tools like ChatGPT are becoming increasingly powerful, and are now a part of the modern development process. Because your end product of this course is a game, and not a specific algorithm, we have a reasonably permissive policy on the use of AI tools. Indeed, we have no problem with you using these tools so long as the tools themselves do not violate the policy on copyrighted material. In this regard, we are sticking to the Steam policy on generative AI in games.

However, that is the problem. Almost all of the generative AI tools have been trained using copyrighted material without the creators’ explicit permission. Midjourney has admitted to training on Magic: The Gathering cards. There is evidence that Stable Diffusion has trained on Getty Images. The only generative art tool we know that has a training set that with no copyright issues is Adobe Firefly. So you are allowed to use that one. For anything else, you must ask first.

Generative AI for software has the same problem. Software has licenses, and some of those licenses are not compatible with generative AI. In particular, there is a strong argument that if a large-language model is trained on GPL software, then any software it generates is also covered by the GPL license. One of our requirements is that code must be Steam legal, so this is not acceptable. Again, verify that the training set is clear of any improper code before using an AI tool.

Individual Work

The vast majority of your grade in this class comes from group projects. However, there are a few individual activities such as the game labs. For those activities, the usual computer science academic integrity policies apply. In particular, you are not to submit any material that is not fundamentally your own. This means you should not get help from anyone other than a course staff member, you should not use generative AI to complete the assignment for you, and you should not look at any solutions posted online.