ChatGPT and AI Tools

This guideline is about referencing the content from AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and DALL-E, in the APA7 style.
Reference Templates Referencing Text Referencing images

General Guidelines

If you use any type of content, such as text or image, generated by AI tools, you must provide an in-text citation and a reference list entry. Please note that the text matching software, Turnitin, shows a percentage of AI generated content separately in its similarity report. The use of AI tools should be approved evidently in the assessment guidelines.

The use of chatGPT or other AI tools should be described either in the introduction or the methods section of your assignment. When you use AI generated response in your text, you must provide the prompt that you have given to the tool to generate responses.

As AI tools generate unique responses in each chat session, you can provide long responses from AI tools in your appendix section. If you are revising your query on a particular topic using more than two prompts, you can give them in the appendix.

As per the American Psychological Association’s new guideline, AI tools are referenced like software and computer applications, the template of which is given below

Author, A. A. or the Name of Group. (Date). Title of work (Version number) [Description of application like Computer software or Mobile app]. Publisher or App Store. URL

Reference List Entry and In-text References

Template

Author of AI model used. (Year of AI model version). Name of AI model used (Version of AI model used) [Type or description of AI model used]. Web address of AI model used

Following is an example of content generated by ChatGPT

Reference list entry

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 23 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat(external link)

  • author is the organisation or the persons who developed this tool.
  • Date is the year of the version you used.
  • Title is the name of the AI tool.
  • Version information of the tool is given in parenthesis after the title of the AI tool. In the case of ChatGPT, you get that information from the bottom part of the chat page. If version information is not available for an AI tool, leave that out.
  • After the version information, give a description of the AI tool in square brackets. As the OpenAI describes their AI tools as large language models, provide that information in square brackets after the version info, which is given in parenthesis. For other AI models, use the description of the respective companies.
  • URL of the chat page of the AI tool is given at the end of the reference entry. As specific responses from AI tools are not retrievable, just provide the URL of the chat page where prompts are given.

In text reference

Parenthetical citation

_______ (OpenAI, 2023)

Narrative citation

According to OpenAI (2023) ______

Referencing example for another AI tool, Bard, is given below.

Reference list entry

GoogleAI. (2023). Bard (April 10 version) [Language model for dialogue applications]. https://bard.google.com/(external link)

In-text reference

Parenthetical citation

________ (GoogleAI, 2023).

Narrative citation

According to GoogleAI (2023) ________

Referencing Text

You can include AI generated text in the following way in your assignment.

Example sentence 1

When prompted with “explain cultural relativism in simple terms” the ChatGPT text generated text noted that cultural relativism stands for evaluating a culture it its own context (OpenAI, 2023).

Example sentence 2 (Direct quote)

When questioned with a prompt “health inequality experienced by Māori” ChatGPT generated text indicated that “the health inequality experienced by Māori has wider social and economic consequences. Poor health outcomes among Māori result in decreased workforce participation, which affects the productivity of the wider economy. Additionally, Māori communities experience increased poverty, which perpetuates the cycle of health inequality” (OpenAI, 2023).

So, the in-text reference format would be the software company, and the date. In this example, ChatGPT was developed by OpenAI. Thus in-text reference is

(OpenAI, 2023)

As explained in the referencing templates section, the entry in the reference list should be in the following format.

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 23 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat(external link)

Referencing Images

Referencing an image generated by DALL-E, an AI image generator developed by OpenAI.

Figure 1

Image of a Tree

Note. Image generated using the prompt “generate a Vincent van Gogh style image of a tree”
(OpenAI, 2023)

You can give the prompt used to generate the image as a note below the image.

Reference list entry

OpenAI. (2023). DALL-E (Version 2) [Large language model]. https://labs.openai.com(external link)

See Also

For more information about citing AI tools like ChatGPT, see this article from the American Psychological Association(external link) style blog.

How to reference AI tools using Zotero- AI tools-Zotero- Guidelines [PDF, 314 KB]

Te Pūkenga NMIT’s generative AI guidelines for ākonga [PDF, 337 KB] and Kaimahi [PDF, 232 KB]

 

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