Skip to Main Content

Citing Sources

Tips on citing sources from the DI Library

Citing AI Tools

If you use text or an image generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) tool, you need to include a citation in a footnote or endnote. The format for the note is:

Title, Publisher, Date, URL.

 

There are four elements of the citation:

  • Title: the name of the tool (ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc.)
  • Publisher: the company that created the tool
  • Date: the date the content was generated
  • URL: the URL (web address) of the tool

Here's an example:

1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, March 7, 2023, https://chat.openai.com/chat.

 

If you don't include the prompt in the text, you can include it in the note:

1. “A modern office rendered as a cubist painting,” image generated by OpenAI’s DALL·E 2, March 5, 2023.

 

If you edited the AI-generated text, you should say so in the text or at the end of the note (e.g., “edited for style and content”).

You do not need to include the AI tool in your bibliography or reference list. Because the tool responds to your prompts, it's treated like an email, phone, or text conversation, or any other type of personal communication. In Chicago style, personal communication is credited through footnotes or endnotes, but not in the bibliography or reference list.

 

Not sure about the name of the company?

Do a quick search for the name of the tool plus "Wikipedia" (e.g.: DALL-E Wikipedia). The first line of the Wikipedia entry will likely include the company name. For example, here's the first line of the DALL-E article on Wikipedia:

DALL-E (stylized as DALL·E), DALL-E 2, and DALL-E 3 are text-to-image models developed by OpenAI using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts".

OpenAI is the name of the company that created that tool.