APA Style Guide: Generative AI

This citation and referencing advice should be used only when your module coordinator or School allows the use of AI tools in the creation of academic assignments. If you have used an AI tool in the creation of an assignment, you must acknowledge this use and cite and reference the tool appropriately to ensure you are adhering to UCD's student plagiarism policy.

Please also be aware that Generative AI is a tool and not an academic or original source.

This advice was created for text-based generative AI systems and does not include other AI-generated content. Advice about citing and referencing AI tools is constantly evolving, and this guide created on October 10th 2023, will be updated as soon as further information becomes available.

For the purposes of this guidance, generative AI is defined as a tool that “can analyze or summarize content from a huge set of information, including web pages, books and other writing available on the internet, and use that data to create original new content” (Weed, 2023).

Generative AI often provides citations and sources that do not exist, or are inaccurate. All such references must be checked by the user to ensure the legitimacy of the references/citations provided by AI tools.
 

Guidance:

According to the APA Style Blog, quoting text from a chat session with a generative AI tool is “like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation (...).You may also put the full text of long responses from [the relevant generative AI tool] in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated.” (McAdoo, 2023)

Since the output of a  chat session with a generative AI tool is not retrievable by other readers, you should include it in an appendix, and refer readers to this appendix when you cite the AI-generated text (Southern Cross University Library, 2023)

Reference:

Company. (Year accessed). Program (Month Day version) [Large language model].URL

The month and day used in this citation style will be the date you accessed/used the resource

Example:

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (May 18 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat.

In-Text Citation:

Company (Year)

(Company, Year)

Examples: 

When using OpenAI (2023) to complete the prompt “Summarise 3 main points from the article “The Role of Librarians in Academic Success” by Claudia J. Dold”, the most recurring ideas were the following: librarians are teachers of information and literacy skills, internal and external collaborators, and scholars within their field.

Archery has been used since the Paelolithic Era to aid in hunting and protection. Since this sport was important to many regions around the world, it became a sport recognized by the Olympics and debuted in the 1900s games, and later became a permanent sport in 1972 (OpenAI, 2023).

McAdoo, T. (2023, April 7). How to cite ChatGPT. APA Style, https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

Southern Cross University, (2023, May 12). Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Tools. Retrieved 16 October 2023 from:https://libguides.scu.edu.au/apa/AITools

Weed, Julie. (2023, March 16) Can ChaptGPT Plan Your Vacation? The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.ocm/2023/03/16/travel/chaptgpt-artifical-intelligence-travel-vacation.html