APA Style: Citing AI Generated Text in APA

Current status

Official guidelines on how to reference A.I. generated or assisted text:

• On April 7, 2023, APA published a blog post as their official guideline on how to cite text from a generative A.I. tool, with a main focus on ChatGPT.

General guidelines

These core elements on A.I. usage should be shared in an APA style document:

• General A.I. usage: A statement that you used A.I. in your scholarly work.
• Specific application: A description of how you used A.I. in your writing / research.
• Exact prompt: The wording you used to prompt a response from the tool.

Where to disclose these core elements in your document:

• In original, peer-reviewed research publications: In the method section or a similar part of your manuscript, describe how you used the A.I. tool in question for your research.
• Secondary scholarly publications : In the introduction of your literature review / essay describe how you used the tool.
• For both: In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.
• Appendices or supplements: APA suggests including the full text of any long responses in an appendix or in online supplemental materials to your publication so readers have access to the exact text that was generated.

Application of APA guidelines

Template

Author. (Date). Title (Version Number) [Additional Descriptions]. Source

How to use this template

Author
The author of the model (tool)

Date
The date is the year of the version you used. You need to include only the year, not the exact date. The → Version Number provides the specific date information a reader might need. 

Title
The name of the model (tool). 

Version Number
The version number of the model/tool is included after the title in parentheses. 

Additional Descriptions
Additional descriptions are used in references as bracketed text, for when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited.  References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source

When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat. For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

In-text:

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Reference list:

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat