Generative Technologies: Citing chatbots

A library research guide for discerning about generative technologies often called artificial intelligence or machine learning

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This library research guide is a collaboration of Academic Integrity Director Jacob Riyeff and Digtial Scholarship Librarian Maxwell Gray.

Digital Scholarship Librarian

Maxwell Gray

he/him/his

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Raynor Library
Marquette University

(414) 288-5996

Subjects: Art, Dance, Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Literature, Performing Arts

Academic integrity

Marquette University wants to help support students use these new technologies responsibly and ethically in their academic work. Fundamentally, this means attributing and citing your use of generative technologies like chatbots like any other sources you use in your academic work.

Generative technologies like chatbots are new and emerging technologies, so conventions surrounding citing them may change over time, and vary across different disciplines and fields. But this library research guide collects the current best practices for citing generative technologies like chatbots.

Citing these new technologies honestly and transparently is the best way to avoid academic misconduct allegations. But remember the acceptance and/or prohibition of using generative technologies like chatbots is at the discretion of individual instructors, so you should always check with your instructors and syllabi for specifics regarding individual course contexts.

Students should remember chatbots are only able to produce synthetic text as the result of many writer's intellectual labors, so not citing generative technologies like chatbots obscures these innumerable contributions to knowledge that chatbots use to provide responses to prompts.

Some places to begin

Marquette University Academic Integrity Pledge
"I recognize the importance of personal integrity in all aspects of life and work. I commit myself to truthfulness, honor and responsibility, by which I earn the respect of others. I support the development of good character and commit myself to uphold the highest standards of academic integrity as an important aspect of personal integrity. My commitment obliges me to conduct myself according to the Marquette University Honor Code."
Message of His Holiness Pope Francis for the 58th World Day of Social Communications
"No doubt, machines possess a limitlessly greater capacity than human beings for storing and correlating data, but human beings alone are capable of making sense of that data. It is not simply a matter of making machines appear more human, but of awakening humanity from the slumber induced by the illusion of omnipotence, based on the belief that we are completely autonomous and self-referential subjects, detached from all social bonds and forgetful of our status as creatures."
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGIES SUPPORT FOR THE CLASSROOM
The university wants to provide clarity on this issue, while also allowing for variety of opinion and practice as colleges, departments, and individual instructors see fit. Regardless of where an instructor falls in the spectrum of use and integration of LLMs into their courses, the university strongly recommends that each instructor make clear both in a course’s syllabus and during class time what the specific expectations for that class are with regard to these new technologies.

Intellectual property

Could a court really order the destruction of ChatGPT? | João Marinotti
"On Dec. 27, 2023, The New York Times filed a lawsuit against OpenAI alleging that the company committed willful copyright infringement through its generative AI tool ChatGPT. The Times claimed both that ChatGPT was unlawfully trained on vast amounts of text from its articles and that ChatGPT’s output contained language directly taken from its articles."
Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law | Robert Mahari, Jessica Fjeld, Ziv Epstein
"Should the artists whose art was scraped to train the models be compensated? Who owns the images that AI systems produce? Is the process of fine-tuning prompts for generative AI a form of authentic creative expression?"
What If We Held ChatGPT to the Same Standard as Claudine Gay? | Matteo Wong
"The conservative activist Christopher Rufo and the journalist Christopher Brunet accused then–Harvard President Claudine Gay of having copied short passages without attribution in her dissertation. Gay later admitted to “instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution,” for which she requested corrections."

Citing chatbots

MLA Style / 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.
Chicago Style / How do you recommend citing content developed or generated by artificial intelligence?
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.
APA Style / How to cite ChatGPT? By Timothy McAdoo
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.