The art of transparency

If using GenAI is allowed on an assignment your professor gives you and if you're using these tools to generate text or images, you should acknowledge that in your paper.

Citations and their formatting might seem irritating, but you need to provide your audience with information that is as reliable as possible. Writing gets its credibility from sourcing the claims it makes. Readers need to be able to fact-check a writer's sources and trace where the claims in a piece come from.

GenAI can be used at various stages of academic work. It may be tolerated not to mention the use of these external aids at very preliminary stages of your work, such as searching for references or translating a reading. On the other hand, the greater the impact of AI assistance on your final work, the greater the need to reference it.

But how do we go about it?

You will sometimes be asked to cite GenAI outputs as any other source of your work. Depending on the curriculum followed and the requirements of the teaching staff, you may be required to follow a particular bibliographic style like MLA, APA, Chicago or Vancouver. In fact, it's always advisable to check in advance which style is required for a given job, as each style has its own recommendations for referencing generative AI.

Note that, in some cases, you will be asked to cite the AI outputs used in your work differently from other academic sources. In this case, you have several options. You can indicate that this is an AI-generated production:
1.	In footnotes
2.	In the “Acknowledgements” section
3.	In the “Methods” section.

In addition to declaring your sources, if you use several generative AI tools in different parts of your work, we recommend that you include a table summarizing all the tools used in your document or its appendices. This table should list, for each tool, the use made for it, the prompts given, and even the links to the conversations and parts of the work concerned. 

Eventually, readers should be able to consult a conversation with GenAI cited in the text. It is therefore recommended to copy into an appendix of your work any conversation with GenAI that is cited in the bibliography of your work.