Citations for ChatGPT

MLA, APA and Chicago have all developed guidelines on how to cite ChatGPT. The page "Associated Sources for Citations and Copyright" contains direct links to their policies and citation examples.

They differ in their approaches. For instance, both APA and Chicago are treating ChatGPT as an author, while MLA is not. Also, at this writing, Chicago recommends either putting a parenthetical note directly in the text stating that the information came from ChatGPT or, when necessary, putting it in a footnote but without any bibliographic reference. It is likely, however, that these recommendations may change over time. 

Discuss with your professor ahead of time what will be acceptable as a citation. This discussion also will help bring to the forefront some of the scholarly challenges using ChatGPT presents to students. This will be useful in helping determine positive ways of using the tool.

Copyright Concerns and Plagiarism

Meanwhile, authors have stated their concerns about copyright abuses inherent to LLMs. ChatGPT is trained on information scraped from a variety of sources, some of which is likely to be copyrighted. Since ChatGPT often doesn't include a citation when its response may include primary source material, unless the user is careful to search out a correct citation for what the ChatGPT just provided, using it could be viewed as plagiarism.

It is worth noting that Open AI, in its Terms and Conditions that users agree to, assigns all legal responsibility of any ChatGPT output to the user. Although untested in the courts, this would seem to remove liability from Open AI for plagiarized material and place it on the user.

This is worth a discussion in the classroom with your professor both to prevent inadvertent plagiarizing, but also to recognize how to be responsible users of LLMs.