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Artificial Intelligence (AI)

A regularly-updated guide to generative AI, AI tools in research, and more. Please email karli.cotton@umontana.edu with suggestions for resources to include.

Citation Elements

APA Style considers the author to be the company responsible for developing a particular AI tool, and the title is the name of the AI tool itself. In citing AI tools, APA also includes bracketed text to better describe the kind of source being cited, as AI is still considered a resource lying outside of the typical peer-reviewed system. You can read more about how to cite AI tools in APA Style on the APA Style Blog.

Author: The company responsible for developing the generative AI tool.

Date: The year of the version of the generative AI tool used. Only the year is required, not the exact date. (You can look up the version number of the tool that you used to find the year.)

Title: The name of the generative AI model serves as the title and is italicized in your reference. (Although some AI companies label unique iterations of their tools--e.g., ChatGPT-4, Chat-GPT4o--the general name of the model serves as the title.)

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL.

In-line Citations and Reference List

In-line Citations

Parenthetical citation: (Author, Date)

Example: (OpenAI, 2023)

 

Narrative citation: Author (Date) [A narrative citation is used when the author's name is used in the text as part of a sentence.]

Example: As evidenced in a recent exchange with OpenAI's Chat-GPT, some generative AI models are connected to the internet and some are not (2023).

 

Reference List

Author. (Date). Title (Version number) [Large language model]. URL

Example: OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat