Tacoma Community College Library: Generative AI: A Student's Guide: Academic Integrity & Citations

TCC GenAI Academic Use Policy proposal sample, and TCC Academic Integrity Policy

TCC Academic Integrity Policy, 2023
"The purpose of Tacoma Community College’s Academic Integrity Policy is to provide guidance and shared language for the TCC community related to expectations of academic standards. Academic integrity ensures our students will gain the necessary knowledge and skills critical for their future academic, professional and personal endeavors. This aligns with our college’s values of community, responsibility, integrity, equity, diversity, inclusion, agility, and excellence."

TCC GenAI Academic Use policy proposal sample
This student-developed policy is currently awaiting approval from TCC President, Dr. Ivan Harrell (March 2025).

Academic Integrity & Citations

Academic Integrity refers to the expectation that all course and program-related work must be completed upholding the values of “honesty, trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility, and courage” (International Center of Academic Integrity).

TCC statement on Academic Integrity: “Academic integrity ensures our students will gain the necessary knowledge and skills critical for their future academic, professional and personal endeavors. This aligns with our college’s values of community, responsibility, integrity, equity, diversity, inclusion, agility, and excellence."

Academic integrity means that your coursework represents your own authentic intellectual and creative work, which includes being transparent about your application of the work of others to your own work.

This is sometimes called using outside sources in your own work, which is an important feature of academic (college and research) work.
This transparency is often in the form of including citations in your work - citation is a service to your reader, letting them know whose work you are applying to your work, and providing your readers with enough information about that work so that they can go find it for themselves.

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.

How do I cite generative AI in MLA style?
From the MLA Style Center
How to cite ChatGPT
From the APA Style Guide
How do you recommend citing content developed or generated by artificial intelligence, such as ChatGPT?
From the Chicago Manual of Style

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.

How to Cite AI Tools: A Guide for Students
For guidelines on citing other formats of generative AI (images, code, videos, etc)
Acknowledging and Citing Generative AI in Academic Work.
A summary of ways to acknowledge use of generative AI

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

Should I cite the AI tool that I used?
by Dr. Kristin Terrill, Iowa State University
How to Cite AI Tools
by Dr. Kristin Terrill, Iowa State University

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

GenAI as sources for academic work

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

There are two important pieces of vocabulary to help us understand more about this. In academic work (your coursework, for example) these two concepts are valuable when it comes to all of the information and ideas you apply to your own work:

retrievability: how well and accurately readers can navigate to the information you have applied to your own work
provenance: the ability for your reader to accurately trace where information comes from that you have applied to your own work - who the authors are and where the information they have applied to their own work comes from

Remember that genAI outputs, such as ChatGPT's outputs, are generated using machine learning algorithms.

GenAI LLMs use their training and our inputs to create an output of "predicted" word strings for that topic. These predicted word strings produce human-like writing that makes them feel familiar and seem reliable.
There is no provenance for this information - we cannot trace where this information comes from.
While some subscription-based genAI tools provide public links to your chats, so your reader can retrieve the output that you applied to your own work, the provenance problem remains, so here, retrievability is no real help.
In addition, outputs may not be accurate or reliable; they are given to bias; they do not cite their sources, or they hallucinate citations to non-existent sources.
Additionally, outputs can be influenced by the user inputs and these may include their own misinformation and bias.
Generally speaking, genAI should be regarded as a tool rather than an information source.

Therefore, unless the assignment specifically allows for the use of genAI outputs as sources, they should not be used as sources for academic work. Ask your instructor, your TCC Librarians, or your TCC Writing Tutors when you have questions about this.