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Using Generative AI in Academic Study: Referencing AI Tools

A guide to best practices for using Generative AI in your university study

✍🏼 Referencing AI Tools

If you do choose to use AI tools for assignments, academic work or any form of published writing, you should give special attention to how you acknowledge and cite the output of these tools in your work. You must always check with your lecturer before using AI for any course work.

Unless your assignment allows it, you should not be using AI outputs as sources for your assessments, so you should not be directly referencing anything it produces as a source.

 

When you may want to directly cite AI tools:

  • You wish to quote the output of ChatGPT as an example of the kinds of materials it produces, in opposition to human-created work.
  • You have been asked by your lecturer to prompt ChatGPT, include its output and then demonstrate how you would edit the GenAI response.

Our guide for referencing AI tools in APA 7th can be found here. 

Formatting In-text References

You may want to consider including the activities you have used AI for, as well as including the exact prompts you used, for example, an appendix with the full AI response where necessary. This will allow your readers to have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because many AI tools will generate a different response in each chat session, even if the same prompt is used. If you create appendices, these need to be called out at least once in the body of your assignment.

An in-text acknowledgement is helpful where the use of the tool is a part of the requested task, and your Lecturer has asked you to engage with AI as a part of the assessment.

This could look like:

"ChatGPT (OpenAI, 2025) was used to brainstorm ideas and I assessed its results for biases..."

OR

"Images used in this presentation to demonstrate AI hallucinations were created using DALL-E 3 (OpenAI, 2025)."

AI-generated Images

To date, there has not been any official guidance published (by the APA Style team) on citing AI-generated images. The following is our current recommendation for referencing AI-generated images using APA 7. We also strongly recommend that you include the question or prompt that generated the image where possible, to provide context for your readers. 

Using these recommendations on referencing images and generative-AI content from our APA Referencing Guide, here is an example of how you might include and cite an AI-generated image in your coursework:

 

In-text citation:

Figure 1 shows that... (Microsoft Copilot & OpenAI, 2024)

 

Format example:

Figure 1

Example of an AI-generated image

Note. Image generated using the prompt, "Create an image of a rabbit eating a carrot in a watercolour style painting," by Microsoft Copilot and OpenAI, Copilot, 2024 (https://copilot.microsoft.com/)

 

Reference list entry:

Microsoft Copilot & OpenAI. (2024). Copilot (DALL-E 3). [AI Image Generator]. https://copilot.microsoft.com/

Major Referencing Style Guidance

Quick Tips

  • Do cite and reference the outputs of generative AI tools when you use them in your work.
  • Do not use sources that are cited by AI tools without checking the original source yourself. This is because GenAI is known to hallucinate, or the cited content may be inaccurate.

  • When in doubt, remember that we reference for two main reasons:

    • First, to give credit where credit is due

    • Second to help others locate the sources you used in your research.

Considering these two things can help you to make a decision about using and citing AI content.

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