AI Citation by Style
Text copied from: APA Style Guide on AI
How do I create an APA reference for AI?
OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (Apr 26 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Google. (2024). Gemini. (May 1 version) [Large language model]. https://gemini.google.com/app
How do I create parenthetical in-text citations?
(OpenAI, 2024)
(Google, 2024)
What is the reasoning?
“If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.”
Author: The author is the host/owner/creator of the model
Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.
Title: The name of the model/application
Text copied from: The Chicago Manual of Style Online
Footnote/Endnote
- Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.
Reasoning:
ChatGPT stands in as “author” of the content, and OpenAI (the company that developed ChatGPT) is the publisher or sponsor, followed by the date the text was generated. After that, the URL tells us where the ChatGPT tool may be found, but because readers can’t necessarily get to the cited content (see below), that URL isn’t an essential element of the citation.
If the prompt hasn’t been included in the text, it can be included in the note:
- ChatGPT, response to “Explain how to make pizza dough from common household ingredients,” OpenAI, March 7, 2023.
But don’t cite ChatGPT in a bibliography or reference list unless you provide a publicly available link (e.g., via a browser extension like ShareGPT or A.I. Archives). Though OpenAI assigns unique URLs to conversations generated from your prompts, those can’t be used by others to access the same content (they require your login credentials), making a ChatGPT conversation like an email, phone, or text conversation—or any other type of personal communication (see CMOS 14.214 and 15.53).
To sum things up, you must credit ChatGPT when you reproduce its words within your own work, but unless you include a publicly available URL, that information should be put in the text or in a note—not in a bibliography or reference list. Other AI-generated text can be cited similarly. Check back with us for updates on this evolving topic.
Text copied from: MLA Style Guide
Works-Cited-List Entry
“Prompt entered” prompt. AI Tool, day month. version, Company, day month. year (accessed), URL.
“Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald” prompt. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.
MLA Figure
Fig. 1. “Pointillist painting of a sheep in a sunny field of blue flowers” prompt, DALL-E, version 2, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, labs.openai.com/.
You should
- cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it
- acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location
- take care to vet the secondary sources it cites (see example 5 below for more details)
- See below for specific examples. And keep in mind: the MLA template of core elements is meant to provide flexibility in citation. So if you find a rationale to modify these recommendations in your own citations, we encourage you to do so. We’ve opened this post up for commenting, so let us know what you think and how you’re using and citing generative AI tools!
Using the MLA Template
Author
We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. This recommendation follows the policies developed by various publishers, including the MLA’s journal PMLA.
Title of Source
Describe what was generated by the AI tool. This may involve including information about the prompt in the Title of Source element if you have not done so in the text.
Title of Container
Use the Title of Container element to name the AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT).
Version
Name the version of the AI tool as specifically as possible. For example, the examples in this post were developed using ChatGPT 3.5, which assigns a specific date to the version, so the Version element shows this version date.
Publisher
Name the company that made the tool.
Date
Give the date the content was generated.
Location
Give the general URL for the tool.
Ai Citation Videos
AI & Plagiarism
- 6 Tenets of Postplagiarism: Writing in the Age of Artificial IntelligenceHistorical definitions of plagiarism will not be rewritten because of artificial intelligence; they will be transcended. Policy definitions can – and must – adapt.
- Artificial intelligence and academic integrity: striking a balanceA look at how universities can encourage the ethical and transparent use of artificial intelligence tools to support learning while guarding against misconduct
- Do Language Models Plagiarize?Given that a majority of LMs’ training data is scraped from the Web without informing content owners, their reiteration of words, phrases, and even core ideas from training sets into generated texts has ethical implications. Their patterns are likely to exacerbate as both the size of LMs and their training data increase, raising concerns about indiscriminately pursuing larger models with larger training corpora. Plagiarized content can also contain individuals’ personal and sensitive information.
- The Files are in the Computer: Copyright, Memorization, and Generative AIA central issue in copyright lawsuits against generative-AI companies is the degree to which a generative-AI model does or does not "memorize" the data it was trained on. Unfortunately, the debate has been clouded by ambiguity over what "memorization" is, leading to legal debates in which participants often talk past one another. In this essay, we attempt to bring clarity to the conversation over memorization.
- How Large Language Models are Transforming Machine-Paraphrased PlagiarismThe recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work. However, the role of large autoregressive transformers in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still developing in the literature.
- Identifying Machine-Paraphrased PlagiarismEmploying paraphrasing tools to conceal plagiarized text is a severe threat to academic integrity. To enable the detection of machine-paraphrased text, we evaluate the effectiveness of five pre-trained word embedding models combined with machine learning classifiers and state-of-the-art neural language models.
- Top 10 Best Plagiarism Checkers For AI-Generated ContentFind out which are the best plagiarism checkers for AI-generated content and how you can use them to check content authenticity.
- Understanding Turnitin’s AI Writing Detection FeatureTurnitin’s new AI writing detection feature has been the talk of the academic community, as it promises to help instructors detect potential plagiarism in student papers. However, users have reported false positives, highlighting the need for caution in relying solely on the tool.
- Using Turnitin to check for plagiarized / AI-generated contentFollow these instructions on how to use Turnitin in Canvas to identify if assignment content has been plagiarized or generated by AI. The AI writing detection model may not always be accurate (it may misidentify both human and AI-generated text) so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student. It takes further scrutiny and human judgment in conjunction with an organization's application of its specific academic policies to determine whether any academic misconduct has occurred.
- UTA Libraries: PlagiarismEven if you paraphrase or put something into your own words, you still must cite the original source.
Citation, Plagiarism, & AI
- APA Style: How to cite ChatGPTWe, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test, and we know our roles in a Turing test. And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT. We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.
- APA Style Blog: How to Cite Software in APA StyleCan you cite computer software in APA Style? Yes! Here’s everything you need to know.
- Chicago Manual of Style: Q. How do you recommend citing content developed or generated by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT? Many scholarly publishers are requiring its identification though also requiring human authors to take responsibility for iA. You do need to credit ChatGPT and similar tools whenever you use the text that they generate in your own work. But for most types of writing, you can simply acknowledge the AI tool in your text (e.g., “The following recipe for pizza dough was generated by ChatGPT”).
- Computers cannot be assigned copyright & it’s mostly because of a monkeyIn keeping with a precedent set when a monkey named Naruto took a selfie (no, really), the Review Board of the US Copyright Office once again refused to assign copyright to an artwork designed by AI, thwarting efforts by a frequent tester of the boundaries of AI and the law, Dr. Stephen Thaler.
- Evaluating the Effectiveness of Turnitin’s AI Writing Indicator ModelTurnitin recently developed what they call an “AI writing indicator model” that is intended to help instructors determine if a student has submitted work that is AI-generated. The model is integrated into Turnitin’s existing plagiarism detection software licensed at Temple, and is therefore convenient as it is already embedded in Canvas. The process for using it is familiar to anyone who has used Turnitin’s signature product, the plagiarism detector, and it returns an “AI score” that closely mirrors the “similarity score” used in Turnitin’s plagiarism detection tool.
- Grammarly: How to Cite ChatGPT and AI in APA FormatAmong its many uses, AI like ChatGPT can be a valuable research tool for papers and other academic writing. But if you’re using its information in a paper that follows APA or another citation style, you still have to cite it like any other source. However, since AI is neither a standard source nor personal communication, how do you cite AI in APA 7?
- Harper College: Citing Generative AIMajor citation styles have begun to address generative AI tools such as ChatGPT. Everyone agrees it's important to be clear if and when you use AI in your work, but there is still some disagreement about what that might look like. The following are the current recommendations, although as with everything, these are subject to change as the world continues to adapt to these technologies.
- MLA: How do I cite generative AI in MLA style?The MLA’s method for citing sources uses a template of core elements—standardized criteria that writers can use to evaluate sources and create works-cited-list entries based on that evaluation. That new technologies like ChatGPT emerge is a key reason why the MLA has adopted this approach to citation—to give writers flexibility to apply the style when they encounter new types of sources.
- Scribbr: ChatGPT Citations | Formats & ExamplesChatGPT, the popular AI language model, is quite new. Educational institutions and style guides are still working out their policies on when and how content from the tool can be used and cited in academic writing.
- When AI Is Writing, Who Is the Author?The language of co-authorship, taken from OpenAI’s own terms and policies, can be useful in addressing the rise of AI writing in the classroom, Sean Ross Meehan writes.
APA recommends attributing authorship to AI, whereas MLA advises against it.
APA
- https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt
- Credit the AI tool as an author.
- "Because "the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although non-retrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications, with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating.
- Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is, therefore, more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation" Quoted from the guide above.
- Per guidelines above a chat with ChatGPT should not be cited as PERSONAL COMMUNICATION either.
EXAMPLE:
When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).
Reference
OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
Guidelines:
- FOR RESEARCH METHODS: "Describe how you used the tool in your Method section."
- FOR LITERATURE REVIEWS or ESSAYS: "Describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response."
- FOR REFERENCE: "Credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation"
MLA
-
Do not credit the AI tool as an author
"We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. This recommendation follows the policies developed by various publishers, including the MLA’s journal PMLA." Quoted from the guide above. Some examples included in the guide are:
- Example 1: Paraphrasing Text
- Example 2: Quoting Text
- Example 3: Citing Creative Visual Works
- Example 4: Quoting Creative Textual Works
- Example 5: Citing Secondary Sources Used by an AI Tool
EXAMPLE 1: Paraphrasing Text
Paraphrased in Your Prose
While the green light in The Great Gatsby might be said to chiefly symbolize four main things: optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness (“Describe the symbolism”), arguably the most important—the one that ties all four themes together—is greed.
Works-Cited-List Entry
“Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald” prompt. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.
Guidelines:
- Cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it.
- Acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location, take care to vet the secondary sources it cites.
This information is adapted from a LibGuide created by Daniel Xiao, Research Impact Librarian at Texas A&M University Libraries.
This LibGuide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. If you would like to reuse any part of this LibGuide for noncommercial purposes, please credit the guide's creators or the original content creator as noted, and include a link to the source.
ChatGPT Plagiarism Checker
- GPTZeroHumans Deserve the Truth: Built for Educators. Plagiarism Scores: Get a holistic score for how much of the document is written by AI
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- ChatGPT Creator Releases Tool to Detect AI-Generated Text, Calls It ‘Unreliable’The startup behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT unveiled a tool for detecting text generated by artificial intelligence amid growing concerns the technology will be abused by cheaters, spammers and others.
- A college student created an app that can tell whether AI wrote an essayEdward Tian, a 22-year-old senior at Princeton University, has built an app to detect whether text is written by ChatGPT, the viral chatbot that's sparked fears over its potential for unethical uses in academia.
- Information Literacy and Generating Fake Citations and Abstracts With ChatGPTIf you’re naive about it, ChatGPT will refuse to generate fake citations or abstracts. ChatGPT can also provide some suggestions that may or may not be useful in the context of information literacy regarding such citations.
- Top 10 AI Detector Tools for 2023These top AI detector tools help you determine if a text was written by ChatGPT or a similar generative AI application.