(Image credit: A traditional copper teapot and a glass of tea, image generated with Gemini Argon by Özgür Çelik.)
This post started in a kitchen. Well, an imaginary one.
This summer, Mary Davis wrote to ask whether I would join a panel for the International Day of Action for Academic Integrity. This year's theme was Recipes for Integrity: Sharing Your Signature Dish, and our session, led by Lorna Waddington, would be called Integrity Kitchens Around the World in the Age of GenAI. Then came the twist: Lorna's idea was that each panelist would bring a kitchen utensil and explain how it represents integrity.
I was thrilled. It was a wonderful idea, and I said yes almost before I had finished reading the email. Academic integrity is often discussed in the language of policies, procedures and penalties. Here was a chance to talk about it with a spoon in hand.
Of course, saying yes was the easy part. Choosing the utensil was harder. I walked around my kitchen for days, looking at every drawer with suspicion. Then, one evening, while I was making tea, the answer was literally steaming in front of me: the traditional Turkish teapot, the “çaydanlık”.
On 21 October, I held it up to my webcam in front of colleagues from around the world. This post is the written version of that conversation, with the tea still warm.
In Türkiye, it is always tea time, so a teapot on my desk during an evening panel felt perfectly natural.
For anyone who has never met one, the çaydanlık is like a two-storey building. Downstairs lives the water, which boils. Upstairs lives the tea, in a small pot we call the “demlik” (the brewer), slowly brewing in the steam from below. You never pour just one thing. First, you pour the strong tea, the “dem” (brewed tea). Then you add hot water from the bottom pot until the glass is exactly as strong as you like.
It sits in every Turkish home, every office and, I can personally confirm, every university department. And the more I looked at it, the more it looked like one of the best models I know for academic integrity in the age of generative AI.
The tea upstairs is the human part of learning: our questions, our reading, our thinking, our voice. The water downstairs is support. Today, a big part of that water is generative AI.
Water is not the enemy. Our students now carry an endless supply of it in their pockets. Banning the water does not work. It only means people make their tea in secret.
But if there is no tea in the pot, all you can serve is hot water. Very fluent, perfectly formatted, grammatically flawless hot water. It looks like a drink. Nobody really wants to drink it.
Good tea also takes time. You put the demlik on, you wait, you let it brew. Learning works the same way. When AI skips the brewing for us, we do not get faster tea. We get no tea.
Every Turkish household has an eternal debate: koyu mu, açık mı? Strong or light?
If the tea is too light, it is basically water with a little colour. That is an integrity culture where anything goes: just "the tool wrote it, so what?"
If the tea is too strong, it turns bitter. You drink it once and never come back. That is what happens when integrity becomes only policing: surveillance, detection scores and suspicion. Students learn to hide, not to learn.
The art is in the balance. My fellow panelist Artem Artyukhov brought kitchen scales to the session, a lovely symbol of precision and fair measurement. With great respect to Artem's scales, tea is the one thing in my kitchen I never weigh. You find the balance by tasting, by talking and by adjusting it together.
This is close to what Sarah Elaine Eaton calls postplagiarism. One of its tenets is that humans can give up control to technology, but not responsibility. In the teapot, the water can do a lot of the work. But whoever serves the tea is responsible for what is in the glass.
At this point in the session, I poured the tea live on camera. I can report that no keyboards were harmed.
Turkish tea is served in a small, clear glass with a thin waist, and there is a reason for that: we want to see the colour. The perfect tea colour even has a name, tavşan kanı, which means "rabbit's blood." No rabbits were harmed in the making of this metaphor either.
The glass hides nothing. That is transparency. If AI was part of the brewing, say so. Show the colour. A declaration is not a confession. It is simply a clear glass.
So here is my signature recipe for integrity in the age of AI:
Because integrity in the age of AI is not something we detect. It is something we brew, together.
So, how do you take your integrity: strong or light? What is in your kitchen that keeps the balance? Tell us in another blog.
Afiyet olsun! Enjoy your tea.
Dr. Özgür Çelik is an EFL instructor and academic integrity researcher at Balıkesir University, Türkiye, where he studies AI in language education, L2 plagiarism and academic integrity. He is also one of the associate editors of the Journal of Academic Ethics.
Acknowledgements: This post is adapted from my contribution to the panel Integrity Kitchens Around the World in the Age of GenAI, held online on 21 October 2026 as part of ICAI's International Day of Action for Academic Integrity (IDoA 2026). I thank Mary Davis for the invitation and Lorna Waddington for leading the panel and for the kitchen utensil idea. The image was generated with Gemini Argon, and Gemini Argon was also used for language editing. I reviewed the final text and take full responsibility for it.
The authors' views are their own.
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