Citation Guides

General guidance:

• Before using a generative AI tool to help with your work, check your course policy on the use of AI.
• Do not cite the AI tool as an author, but as a tool used to edit, translate, summarize, or other.
• Do not trust the AI tool to provide citations, as these tools often create false citations (called "hallucinations") to make it appear scholarly.

Recommendations:

• Just as you should cite any text that you paraphrase, summarize, or quote in your own writing, the same rule applies for use of text generated by AI. 

• Describe somewhere in your text or in a note at the end of your text, all uses you made of the generative AI tool. 

  • For example: “I used ChatGPT to summarize the meaning of the poem “Oda al Gato” by Pablo Neruda”. 

• Always check any sources cited by a generative AI tool. They are often invented.

Constructing a citation:

• Author: Normally the author element would normally go first, however you should never use an AI tool as the author. Therefore this element would be skipped.

• Title of Source: To create a title, describe how the text was generated by the AI tool. You might include a brief description of the prompt you used.

• Title of Container: Use the name of the AI tool, and put in italics.

• Version: Use this to name the version of the tool, if available.

• Publisher: Name the company that made the tool.

• Date: Give the date the content was generated.

• Location: Give the URL for the homepage of the tool. 

Example, putting all the above elements together:

“Summarize the meaning of the poem Oda al Gato” prompt. ChatGPT, 4o mini version, OpenAI, 30 Oct. 2024, chatgpt.com/.

In-text citation:

Follow the normal MLA rules for creating an in-text citation. Using the above example citation, the text of your essay which includes an in-text citation might look like this. (Note that in MLA style citations, longer titles may be shortened in the in-text citation):

I consulted ChatGPT as I worked on reading and understanding the poem “Oda al Gato” in the original Spanish. The summary that was generated confirmed that Neruda uses “vivid imagery” in describing the cat, and gives a sense of “joy and comfort” of having a cat as a pet (“Summarize the meaning”).

Additional resources to consult: