APA 7th Citation Guide
Considerations Regarding AI Tools
- An author has the legal, moral, etc. responsibility for the intellectual content of a publication of which he or she is the author. According to Springer Nature, Elsevier, etc. ChatGPT is not an author.
- In its Terms of Use, OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT) assumes no responsibility:
"You accept and agree that any use of outputs from our service is at your sole risk and you will not rely on output as a sole source of truth or factual information, or as a substitute for professional advice."
Major Publishers' Viewpoints on AI Tools
Generally, publishers do not accept large language models (LLMs) as authors of a research article. In addition, they mention in their policies the acceptable usage and ask that the use of AI tools be disclosed.
"Any attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, and AI tools cannot take such responsibility. Researchers using LLM tools should document this use in the methods or acknowledgements sections. If a paper does not include these sections, the introduction or another appropriate section can be used to document the use of the LLM."
● IEEE
"The use of AI-generated text in an article shall be disclosed in the acknowledgements section of any paper submitted to an IEEE Conference or Periodical. The sections of the paper that use AI-generated text shall have a citation to the AI system used to generate the text."
● Elsevier
"Where authors use generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process, these technologies should only be used to improve readability and language of the work. [...] The authors are ultimately responsible and accountable for the contents of the work."
● arXiv
"By signing their name as an author of a paper, they each individually take full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. If generative AI language tools generate inappropriate language, plagiarized content, biased content, errors, mistakes, incorrect references, or misleading content, and that output is included in scientific works, it is the responsibility of the author(s)."
Mention - and Do NOt CITE! - the AI tools
For the reasons mentioned at the left, even though APA suggets a (now obsolete) way to cite ChatGPT answers, we recommend that you do not create in-text citations and references for ChatGPT answers (or other AI tools) and mention in your text how you used it.
For example, a student could write:
- I used Dall-E to create the following image (add the link to the image if a permanent link exists): ...
- I asked ChatGPT the question "..." and its answer was (add permanent link to answer): "..." ...
- I corrected the spelling and grammar in my report by using ChatGPT.
Do not create OpenAI (2024) citations in the text and references in the reference list!
Ask your instructor / professor if you are allowed to use an AI tool for your assignments, projects, reports, etc., and under what conditions.
