Almost every IB student is quietly asking this. Your teacher says you can use AI "to an extent" but never really says where the line is. IB is strict about academic integrity and the fear of getting flagged is real. So here is the straight answer. You can use AI for your Extended Essay. You just have to know what it is actually for.
The short answer
IB has put out an official position that accepts students will use AI. It treats AI as a thinking partner rather than a ghostwriter, and that is basically the whole rule. You can use it to think. You cannot use it to write your essay.
Where AI is fine
- 1Talking through where to take your topic and brainstorming angles
- 2Finding sources for you to go and read yourself
- 3Summarising dense papers so you can decide if they are worth reading
- 4Explaining concepts you don't understand yet
- 5Checking your citations and catching formatting errors
In all of these you are still the one thinking. The AI is reacting to work you have already done.
Where it gets you flagged
The line is the writing. The moment AI writes your essay, or even one section, or rewrites a paragraph to "improve" it, the work stops being yours. That is what gets flagged, and it has cost students their diploma.
Why "Turnitin didn't flag it" is false comfort
Plenty of students run their essay through the public version of Turnitin, see nothing, and assume they are safe. Two problems with that. First, IB does not use commercial Turnitin, so a clean result on the public tool tells you very little about the version IB actually uses. Second, detection is not only about writing style. A lot of it is repetition across students. If you and a classmate have similar topics and both ask a chatbot to write a section, the outputs come out almost identical, and an examiner who is paying attention can flag that by hand without any software.
AI won't get you an A anyway
Even the newest models don't really know what an EE needs. They produce something that sounds good in general but misses IB's specific standards. Not because IB is harder, it is just different. AI also hands everyone the same surface-level conclusions. The marks come from the opposite of that: you reading enough sources to spot something odd or contradictory, and then doing something with it. That part has to come from you, not a prompt.
I initially used AI to generate my EE research question, prompted specifically to match the rubric for an A. My supervisor read it and literally told me it was rubbish. That's when I realised my own brain was smarter than AI for IB-specific things. I ended up with a 32/34.
— A 32/34 Business Management graduate
Key Takeaways
- Use AI as a sparring partner: brainstorming, sources, summaries, explanations
- Never let AI write the essay or any part of it
- A clean public Turnitin result does not mean IB will miss it
- AI gives everyone the same shallow conclusions, so the marks live in your own thinking
- Keep the thinking yours and you will be fine
Free tool
Want to use AI the right way? The free EE Dump helps you collect sources and build your bibliography, which is the legitimate side of the process.