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Generative AI - a student's guide: Academic integrity and citation

AI and academic integrity

Academic integrity includes the ethical use and production of information.

Generally speaking, the use of any source of information in your own work that you yourself have not written, coded, drawn, photographed, painted, composed, etc. must be cited, or attributed to the person, or tool, that produced that informational or creative work.

Unless you have been assigned to use generative AI tools in your course work, all of your knowledge, information, and creative work must be your own, just as was true prior to wide availability of generative  AI tools. Just as before, any use of outside sources, or work generated by other humans, or AI tools, must be cited in your own work.

Here is a partial list of what might be considered misuse of generative AI tools in your own work, and may be considered violations of academic integrity:

  • Plagiarism: Allowing generative AI tools to do your work for you, in any amount, for example: Writing all or part of a paper.
  • Cheating: Allowing generative AI to answer quiz or assignment questions for you.
  • Falsifying: Allowing generative AI tools to post to a discussion forum for you on a reading or concept. This may be considered "falsifying" your knowledge.
  • Fabricating: Allowing generative AI tools to produce relevant lab results to mimic lab work that has been assigned to you.

Citing generative AI

How to cite generative AI

Remember to check with your instructor. Some instructors might not allow any use of generative AI, such as ChatGPT and more, and others might allow only limited use.

If you are allowed to use generative AI in an academic assignment, here are some guidelines for citing.

Your instructor may also ask for an appendix that includes the prompts that you provided to the generative AI tool or the full transcript of your interaction.

For guidelines on citing other formats of generative AI (images, code, videos, etc), see How to Cite AI Tools: A Guide for Students.

See also this summary of ways to acknowledge use of generative AI: Acknowledging and Citing Generative AI in Academic Work.

It's also worth reading this advice, since some uses don't fit the standard way of citing: 

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Credit: Based on the work of University of Arizona Libraries. CC BY 4.0

Are generative AI outputs "sources?"

Are generative AI outputs "sources" of information for academic work?

 It's important to note that generative AI outputs are still largely predictive - the large language models (LLMs) use what they have been trained on in the context of the user's prompts to generate content. They may not always be accurate or reliable; they do not cite their sources and can hallucinate non-existent sources; and outputs can be influenced by the user themselves. Outputs are also "non-retrievable." Therefore, unless you have been given an assignment that makes direct use of gAI outputs as informational sources, gAI outputs may be useful as a starting point for research-based assignments, but they should not be used as sources for academic work because academic work is founded on the ability to track and credit the verifiable works and ideas of humans.

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