MLA and APA Provide Guidance for Citing Content Created by AI

It's a bit of an understatement to say that the rapid growth of AI-powered writing and drawing tools is raising many questions for teachers and students. One of those frequently asked questions is "how do you cite ChatGPT?" 

Recently, the MLA and the APA have published guidance on how to cite content created through the use of AI tools like ChatGPT. You can read the MLA guide to citing content created by AI here. The APA guide's to citing content created ChatGPT can be read here. 

There are many similarities between the two guides. There is one difference that's worth noting. The APA's guide includes a template for citing ChatGPT as an author. The MLA guide says not to treat generative AI tools like ChatGPT as an author. 

If you haven't yet tried ChatGPT or Google Bard, watch the videos below to see how they work. 

Video - A Short Overview of ChatGPT

Video - A Short Overview of Google Bard



Learn more about AI tools in education:

• Bing, Bard, and Search Results
• Get to Know AI Before Your Students Turn In an Essay With It
• Edpuzzle Add AI-generated Questions
• Detecting Documents Written by AI
• Auto-generated Presentations Present a New Challenge
• gotFeedback - An AI-powered Tool for Giving Students Feedback

How to Create Citations and Bibliographies in Google Docs - No Add-ons Required

For years I used the Easy Bib add-on to add citations and create bibliographies in Google Docs. A couple of weeks ago Google added an updated citation tool to Google Docs that makes the Easy Bib add-on redundant. With the latest update to Google Docs you can now create MLA, APA, and Chicago style citations directly in Google Docs without the need for a third-party add-on. You'll find the new citation feature in the tools drop-down menu in Google Docs. 

In the following video I demonstrate how to create citations and bibliographies in Google Docs. One of the aspects of the new tool that I like is that it walks students through where to put each piece of required information. 

Whenever I've shared bibliography tools like this in the past I have received emails from folks who think that students should learn how to make bibliographies without the help of an add-on. To that I say, I learned how to make a bibliography by following the template in an early 90’s version of The Student Writer. Using a template provided by Google Docs isn’t much different than that. And at the end of the day, I'm more concerned with getting my high school students to recognize the importance of citing their sources than I am having them learn the exact (often changing) rules of MLA or APA. 

Citelighter - Store, Organize, and Share Research

Citelighter is a helpful tool for anyone trying to organize their online and or offline research findings. At its core Citelighter is a browser extension (available for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari) that enables you to select sections of webpages and save them along with the important information needed to create an APA, MLA, or Chicago style bibliography. If you have pieces of text from books and journals that you want to include in your list of citations, you can add those in Citelighter too.

Citelighter also has a community aspect that allows you to share your citations and search those of others. The citations in the public gallery are called "Knowledge Cards." Knowledge Cards are the pieces of quoted text that others have saved and tagged with a subject area. The Knowledge Cards you find in the public gallery can be added to the project lists in your personal Citelighter account.

Watch the video below to see all of Citelighter's features in action.

Citelighter How It Works from saad alam on Vimeo.

Applications for Education
Citelighter could be a fantastic research aid for students. The clipping feature allows students to highlight the key information from a page so that a few days down the road they're not wondering why they bookmarked a webpage. The bibliography tools help students properly format their works cited pages. And searching the Knowledge Cards is like opening to the bibliography of a good book and finding out what the author used in his or her research.

Five Free Bibliography Generators

One of my standard lesson plans at the beginning of each school year involves research and citation. I take my students down to the library where the librarian and I review with students a variety of research tools. Students are very good at finding information, but they almost always struggle with creating properly formatted citations. Fortunately, there are many free websites that students can use to get help properly formatting their bibliographies.

Ottobib and Bibomatic both use ISBN numbers find books and format citations. Those are both good, easy to use tools, but often students will need help formatting citations from other sources therefore students may want to try Carmun, Citation Machine, Bibme.

Applications for Education
Unlike some bibliography creation tools all five of the websites I've mentioned provide citation formatting in APA and MLA styles. While these tools are great because they make citation formatting easy for students, I think it is still important for students to know how to properly format citations. When students are learning to format citations free bibliography websites are useful for double checking bibliography format before turning in a paper.