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 Digtial Scholarship Librarian Maxwell Gray and Academic Integrity Director Jacob Riyeff.

The Baldwin Test

Artifice and Intelligence | Emily Tucker
"The threat of lost agency is real, but not because computers are yet capable of anything similar to, let alone superior to, human intelligence. The threat is real because the satisfaction of corporate greed, and the perfection of political control, requires people to lay aside the aspiration to know what their own minds can do."

VanillaIceGPT

When Robots Come Home to Roost: The Differing Fates of Black Language, Hyper-Standardization, and White Robotic School Writing (Yes, ChatGPT and His AI Cousins) | Carmen Kynard
"When I had enough, I asked ChatGPT my most pressing question. I asked ChatGPT to give me a racial criticism and analysis of itself. It gave me perhaps the whitest of white answers: it refused."

Academic integrity

For students

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 and other generative technologies are only able to algorithmically produce text content from the statistical analysis of large datasets of human-generated text, so not citing generative technologies like chatbots obscures these real human contributions to knowledge that chatbots use to re-produce text context in response to user prompts.

For faculty

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."

Intellectual property

Could a court really order the destruction of ChatGPT? | João Marinotti
"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, and Ziv Epstein
"As generative AI art tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have been thrust into the limelight, so too have questions about ownership and authorship. These tools’ generative ability is the result of training them with scores of prior artworks, from which the AI learns how to create artistic outputs."
Generative AI Has an Intellectual Property Problem | Gil Appel, Juliana Neelbauer, and David A. Schweidel
"This process comes with legal risks, including intellectual property infringement. In many cases, it also poses legal questions that are still being resolved. For example, does copyright, patent, trademark infringement apply to AI creations? Is it clear who owns the content that generative AI platforms create for you, or your customers? Before businesses can embrace the benefits of generative AI, they need to understand the risks — and how to protect themselves."

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.

Marquette University

Raynor Library