Setting the lab's AI policy, and enforcing it
Lesson 6 of 6 · Running a group
1 · Learn the move · Multi-persona
A lab AI policy living in a drawer is a disclaimer, not a policy. The one that works is short, specific to your lab's risks, and stress-tested before adoption: the same draft read from five seats. The first-year who pastes first and asks later; the postdoc with sponsor data on a CDA; the collaborator whose material crosses labs; the journal editor reading your disclosure; the tech transfer officer learning a sequence entered a chat months before the filing. Each seat finds a different hole. The policy's spine is fixed - what never gets pasted routes to TTO, IRB, or the sponsor agreement; every model-produced citation carries a verification state; AI use is recorded in the ELN; nothing patient-facing, ever - and enforcement lives in onboarding, templates and spot checks, with a termly review, because journal and funder policies move.
Stress-test my draft lab AI policy from five personas: first-year student, postdoc holding CDA/sponsor data, external collaborator, journal editor reading our disclosure, tech transfer officer. For each: read the draft in their seat, name the hole they find, and the one-line fix. Spine that cannot weaken: never-paste list (unpublished data, sequences, CDA/sponsor material, human-subject data - route to TTO/IRB/sponsor agreement), verification states on citations, AI use in the ELN, nothing patient-facing. Then the enforcement plan: onboarding, templates, spot checks, termly review.
2 · Your turn. You write the prompt
Your lab of nine has nine private AI workflows: a student who pastes everything, a postdoc who refuses on principle, and seven people in between - one of whom asked a model to summarize the industry sponsor's protocol last month, which is exactly the incident the CDA conversation with your TTO is now about. The policy you never wrote is being written for you. Write yours first.
Remember: the AI sees only your prompt, not this page. If the situation isn't in your prompt, it doesn't exist.
Optional. These shape the output when you run your prompt below, not your score.