AI Resources

Talking Points About Academic Integrity and AI

Different professors may allow limited use of Generative AI tools with proper citation, or accept its use on a case-by-case basis. It is up to the instructor to decide if and to what extent AI will be used in a course. Students much check with their instructor prior to using AI tools.

Why is it important to cite sources?

• Citing gives credit to the source creator’s ideas and words and can strengthen your argument or position. 
• Citing the author or source avoids plagiarism. Plagiarism is the act of claiming another person's language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions as though they were one’s own work. What counts is whether you created it or someone/something created it or helped create it for you.

• A citation is like an address for a source; citing tells the reader where you, the writer, found the source.  Reader can visit the original source if needed. 

Considering the points above, researchers should be aware of the following considerations. ChatGPT...

• May generate citations for sources that do not exist.
• May be unable to provide specific sources of information or citations for the information it shares in a response to a query; its responses come from across a vast corpus.  
• The platform is only as good as the information it draws from, and the current ChatGTP 3.5 (free) platform was released in 2021; the free version is already a few years old.  It also may contain contradictory, biased, or false information.

Example: Upon asking ChatGPT to provide an annotated bibliography on the topic of residential care options for adults with autism, it provided a list with four citations and well-worded annotations. Although they all included real journal titles with corresponding volumes and issues, none of the article titles, authors or pagination matched any of the journals they were listed within. These were fabricated citations.

Example: Upon asking ChatGPT to provide an outline for the topic described above, it gave the response below. It is sometimes unable to explain where information came from or refer to specific sources:
"As for my source of information, I am an AI language model, and I generate my responses based on a vast amount of knowledge that I have been trained on."

Further Reading 

"Using AI to Write Scholarly Publications," by Hosseini, Rasmussen, and Resnik. In Accountability in Research. 
This article provides an academic discussion on the issues with using artificial intelligence tools to write scholarly publications.