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APA Citation & Formatting: Citing Generative AI

Useful information to help you create a well-formatted document in APA 7th edition style

Generative AI in Academic Writing

Student Code of Conduct

The Sauk Valley Community College Student Code of Conduct includes in its definition of cheating “dependence upon the aid of sources beyond those authorized by the instructor in writing papers, preparing reports, solving problems, or carrying out other assignments.”

If your instructor has not explicitly authorized the use of generative artificial intelligence in writing assignments, then engaging in this use is a violation of College policy. If you are uncertain as to your instructor’s individual policy check your syllabus or ask the instructor directly.

Use of Generative AI as a Writing Tool

ChatGPT and similar generative artificial intelligence tools do not provide information outputs in the way that web pages do. Responses from these tools contain a mix of outputs from various sources across the Internet. Shortcomings of these tools include the following

  • Most of them do not provide specific sources for content
  • When asked to provide citations they sometimes provide fake information or “hallucinations”
  • The training data from which these platforms pull information is static, so information can be dated or otherwise inaccurate
  • Information provided can be subject to the social and intellectual biases of its training data

If you do use artificial intelligence in your academic writing you must cite its use. The American Psychological Association (APA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA) have both published guidelines for this that are not contained in the most recent editions of their respective style manuals.

Noodle Tools is also equipped to help you cite AI output in MLA, APA, and Chicago styles, along with all of your other source types too:
Citing ChatGPT, Bard and other AI tools

Citation Advice from the APA Style Team

In Your Paper

The APA Style team suggests that you describe how you used the tool in your paper by providing the prompt you used and then the relevant section of text generated from ChatGPT (or other generative artificial intelligence tool) in response to that prompt.

If you would like to provide readers with the full text of a long response, they suggest including this in an appendix or online supplemental materials. Because the response is unique to your particular chat session It is important to document the exact text that was created during that session. If you do include the full text of the response this way, make sure that you acknowledge this somewhere within the body of your paper.

Parenthetical Citation (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).

References (Example)

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License