Citing AI in MLA 9

Citing Artificial Intelligence Content in MLA 9

All information taken from 

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in the Classroom. Algonquin College of Applied Arts and Technology

https://www.algonquincollege.com/lts/ai/

MLA Handbook. 9th ed., Modern Language Association of America, 2021. MLA Handbook Plus, 2021, mlahandbookplus.org

General Information about using AI

AI works by scanning the internet for words related to the prompt a person puts into the AI search engine.  Once the text is generated, the AI program will list where it got its sources.  Because AI can’t discern between good and bad sources, the researcher (you!) have to look at those secondary sources and determine if they are reliable sources or not.

Always confirm with your teacher that the use of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are allowed for your assignment.

• cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it 

• acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location 

• Verify the accuracy of the information and sources produced by the AI tool. (AI tools can generate false information and cite non-existent sources.)

• Keep in mind that, AI tools do not always cite sources or, when they do, do not always indicate precisely what a given source has contributed. If you cite an AI summary that includes sources and do not go on to consult those sources yourself, your run the risk of using information that is not correct, does not make sense or is not proven to be true.

Things to consider when citing AI sources

The Author

The AI tool is not the author, so don’t use a format that designates AI as an author.

Title of Source

Describe what was generated by the AI tool. This may involve including information about the prompt in the Title of Source element if you have not done so in the text. 

Title of Container

Use the Title of Container element to name the AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT).

Version

Name the version of the AI tool as specifically as possible. For example, the examples in this post were developed using ChatGPT 3.5, which assigns a specific date to the version, so the Version element shows this version date.

Publisher

Name the company that made the tool.

Date

Give the date the content was generated.

Location

Give the general URL for the tool.

From the above information, perhaps you wrote the following:

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.

Your Works-Cited-List Entry would be this:

“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.

AI Citation Example #2- Using direct quotation from an AI source

From the above information, perhaps you wrote the following:

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.

Your Works-Cited-List Entry would be this:

“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.

Or

Symbolism of the green light in The Great Gatsby prompt to list sources. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 9 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

Fig. 1. “Pointillist painting of a sheep in a sunny field of blue flowers” prompt, DALL-E, version 2, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, labs.openai.com/.

AI Citation Example #4- Citing an AI Created story or poem

If you ask a generative AI tool to create a work, like a poem, how you cite it will depend on whether you assign a title to it. Let’s say, for example, you ask ChatGPT to write a villanelle titled “The Sunflower” that—you guessed it!—describes a sunflower and then quote it in your text. Your works-cited-list entry might look like this:

“The Sunflower” villanelle about a sunflower. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

If you did not title the work, incorporate part of or all of the first line into the description of the work in the Title of Source element:

“Upon the shore . . .” Shakespearean sonnet about seeing the ocean. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat.

AI Citation Example #5: Citing Secondary Sources Used by an AI Tool

For example, let’s say that you ask Bing AI to explain the concept of the political unconscious, citing sources, and it provides the following answer:

Let’s say that you then decide to quote from the final sentence. You need to click through to the source listed in the note in order to get more information than just a URL for the source. There, you will read the following:

Now, you can treat Oxford Reference as your source since Bing AI was merely a research conduit to the source (see MLA Handbook 5.34 for more information). If for some reason you want to treat a source cited in a generative AI tool as an indirect source–and you know it is, in fact, the source for the information provided by the AI, follow the guidance in section 6.77 of the MLA Handbook.