UnTXT and University College London's AI Policy - What Students Need to Know
Summary: UCL asks you to acknowledge generative AI where it helped create the work, and leaves the detail to each department. UnTXT creates nothing, your department still decides, and our advice is to mention it anyway.
What UCL's AI Policy Actually Says
UCL ties the question to a single word, and the word is creating.
Its guidance asks you to acknowledge generative AI "in any piece of academic work where it has been used as a functional tool to assist in the process of creating the academic work". It then says acknowledgement may not be needed for things like "helping to improve your grammar and writing structure" — the tidying-up end, rather than the making end.
UnTXT sits further from creating than a grammar checker does. It writes nothing, suggests nothing and changes nothing. It reads a finished draft and marks the passages that carry machine-writing patterns, and then it stops.
What UCL does not do is give you a blanket answer, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Its guidance is explicit that "it is the nature of the task that determines whether use needs acknowledgement or not. This will be discipline and assessment dependent, so it is for teaching staff to determine." Where it is unclear, UCL's own instruction is plain: "Students should ask teaching staff if further clarification is needed."
So the honest answer for a UCL student is that your department decides, and asking is cheap.
What we would do. Mention it anyway. One line in your submission — "I used UnTXT, an AI pattern checker, to check my own draft" — takes a sentence and closes the question permanently. Declaring something you did not strictly need to declare has never gone badly for anybody.
Source: Acknowledging and referencing GenAI — UCL Library Skills, checked 11 October 2026. UCL also publishes assessment-level guidance through its Generative AI Hub. Policies change; where UCL'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 UCL 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 UCL 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.