UnTXT and Imperial College London's AI Policy - What Students Need to Know
Summary: Imperial devolves the AI question to your department — its college-level guidance is explicitly non-exhaustive and varies by discipline. Check your department's current policy first. UnTXT reads your draft and marks AI-pattern passages; it generates nothing.
What Imperial's AI Policy Actually Says
Imperial's answer to "can I use this?" is, more than at most universities, your department's answer.
Its own checklist for students leads with exactly that instruction: "Review your department's current policy on using and disclosing genAI in academic work." Imperial's college-level principles set direction and say plainly that they "are not intended to be exhaustive", noting that the use of generative AI "will vary across academic disciplines". Aeronautics and Medicine are not obliged to land in the same place, and they do not.
That devolution is the single most useful thing to know as an Imperial student, and it is the thing most third-party summaries of Imperial's position leave out.
What this means for a checker. UnTXT does not generate anything — it reads a draft you already wrote and marks passages carrying machine-writing patterns. Most departmental policies are written about tools that produce text, which is a different object. But we are not going to tell you your department has approved it, because we have not read your department's policy and Imperial's own guidance is that it is the one that governs.
Find it, and read the paragraph about disclosure specifically.
What we would do. Say you used it. One line — "I used UnTXT, an AI pattern checker, to check my own draft before submission" — costs nothing and settles it. Imperial's general expectation is that AI-derived material in your work is attributed; a line about a tool you only used to check yourself sits comfortably inside that habit.
Source: Imperial Generative AI Checklist and Generative AI Principles, checked 11 October 2026. Your department's policy sits above both. Where Imperial's pages and this one disagree, theirs is the one that counts.
Where the rule that binds you lives
The university-wide page is rarely the whole answer. Check, in this order: your assessment brief, then your module or course handbook, and if neither says, ask whoever set the work. If it matters, get the answer in writing.
Using UnTXT on Imperial work
- Finish the draft first. Run it on something complete. A half-written argument reads as disjointed to any checker, ours included.
- Paste it in and press Analyse. Two AI models read it separately and argue over each passage, and a third settles what they cannot agree on.
- Read the reasons on the grey passages. Grey means the passage follows the patterns machine writing leans on. Formal academic prose earns that honestly, so read the reason before you change anything.
- Leave the gold alone. Those passages already sound like you.
- Change what you decide to change, in your own words. Nothing on the page will write it for you.
- Say you used it, if your course asks which tools you used, and arguably even if it does not.
What the marks do and do not mean
A mark is not a verdict, and it is not evidence of how you wrote something. Grey says a passage reads a certain way. It cannot say who wrote it, and nobody at Imperial should be told otherwise on the strength of it, by you or by anybody else.
There is no percentage, because a number invites people to treat a reading as a ruling.
Questions
What does it cost?
The first 1,000 words are free, with no card. That covers an extract more often than a whole essay. Checking whole pieces means a monthly plan, from £8.40 including tax.
Can I check a dissertation in sections?
Yes. Every check is saved to your Documents under its own title, so you can go a chapter at a time.
My work has been questioned. What now?
Bring your process: drafts, notes, the sources that surprised you. That settles the question better than any tool's output does. There is a longer piece at If you have been accused.