Guides: Preus Library's AI Literacy Guide: Citing AI

General Guidelines for Transparency

Acknowledgment

When you've used AI as part of an assignment or project, it's important to be transparent about your use of that tool. You should specify which tool you used, how you used it, and how the AI-generated content was incorporated into your work. A statement of acknowledgement may be included in the body of the text, as a footnote, or as an appendix. For most writing, you only need a statement of acknowledgment, but for assignments and research papers, you might need to incorporate it in addition to a formal citation. Check your professor's or publisher's guidelines.

Example: I acknowledge the use of [insert AI system(s) and link] to [specific use of generative artificial intelligence]. I used the following prompts: [list of prompts]. The output from these prompts was used to [explain use].

Example: This report was written with the help of [insert AI system(s) and link] for the purpose of [improving clarity, tone adjustment, brevity, organizational structure etc.]. AI-generated output was reviewed, edited, and refined by [your name].

Reflection

For some projects and assignments, you may need to include a more thorough reflection of your use of AI in your acknowledgment. Such a reflection is necessary not only for the sake of transparency, but also to help you demonstrate how you applied AI in your process, and how your own thoughts and critical voice are expressed in your finished work.

Example: For this essay, I used Chat GPT to give me a summary of the feminist and queer theory analysis lens: “Feminist queer theory is a critical analysis lens that combines feminist theory and queer theory to examine how gender and sexuality intersect and shape social power dynamics. This approach challenges the dominant cultural norms that promote heteronormativity, gender binary, and patriarchy, which result in marginalizing individuals who do not conform to these norms.” The generated summary helped me better understand the material so I could write better essays. This information was accessed on, May 6th, 2023.

Document Your Prompts

Always be transparent about your use of AI, and about the prompts you use. Keep a log. Carefully document your usage, and keep a record of the prompts you input into AI tools. For extensive use of AI for work you plan to share, you may need to duplicate the full text of your prompts in footnotes or an appendix.

Even if your full prompts are not fully included in your final work, the act of documenting your process is still important for research--if for no other reason than so you can follow your own breadcrumbs!

Examples in this section are adapted from Acknowledging and Citing Generative AI in Academic Work by Liza Long. CC BY 4.0.

How to cite AI

MLA Style -- How do I cite generative AI in MLA style?
- "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"
APA Style -- How to Cite ChatGPT
"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."
CMS -- How to Cite AI Sources
"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').
If you need a more formal citation—for example, for a student paper or for a research article—a numbered footnote or endnote might look like this:
1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat."