Artificial Intelligence: Citing AI Content

MLA Style: How to cite generative AI

General Information

As a student, you should always check with your professor to find out if AI can be used. If it is not allowed, don't use it. If it is allowed, you need to give attribute to it as a source and acknowledge or disclose how it was used.

The MLA Style website provides some basic guidance for citing your use of generative AI. According to MLA:

• Cite a generative AI tool when paraphrasing, quoting or using content that was created by that tool.
• Acknowledge uses of the tool such as editing, or correcting your work, or translating words. This can be done in a variety of was such as a separate note, in your text, on a slide in your PPT presentation, or other suitable place. 
• Make sure to check any secondary sources your AI tool cites (they are not always real).

The components of an MLA citation are:

• Author
• Title of source
• Title of container
• Version
• Publisher
• Date
• Location

MLA recommendations for AI sources are:

• Author- do not treat the AI tool as an author
• Title of source- describe what was generated- this can be done by using your prompt as the title of source
• Title of container- name the AI tool used (Bard, ChatGPT, etc.)
• Version- name the AI tool you used being as specific as possible as many tools do have different versions. (ChatGpt 3.5, ChatGpt 4, DALL-E 2)
• Publisher- the company that made the tool
• Date- when the content was generated
• Location- a general URL for the tool.

The MLA Style site gives an example of a prompt:

"Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald."

MLA Style example of a paraphrase from the generated content:

While the green light in The Great Gatsby might be said to chiefly symbolize four main things: optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness ("Describe the symbolism"), arguably the most important --the one that ties all four themes together--is greed. 

MLA Style example of Works Cited entry:

"Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald" prompt. ChatGpt, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar.2023, chat.openai.com/chat

In the above citation, you can see the title is the prompt that was used and it is identified as a prompt. The "container" is the tool used - ChatGpt. It was the February 13th version, and was created by OpenAI. the prompt was given and the response generated on March 8th, 2023. Finally, the general URL for ChatGpt is given in MLA format.

To find the version, look at the bottom of the page for clues. An example from ChatGpt is shown here where it states it is the September 25 Version. You should include the year in your citation even though the current year is left off of the ChatGPT site.