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Artificial Intelligence: Challenges and Opportunities

The Use of AI Generated Content

At CGI, we are entering a time of thoughtful consideration of artificial intelligence and its role and uses in our academic programs.  We look forward to dialogue with students, faculty, and staff on both the challenges and opportunities that AI presents to us, for personal, professional, and academic use.

At this time, the policies that exist at CGI that can govern use of AI-generated work include the following statements from our Academic Integrity policy and syllabi:

  • Use of any third-party applications, technologies, artificial intelligences, services, or individuals to complete academic work
  • Falsification, alteration, reporting, or invention of any information, data, or citation in any academic exercise

We see so much potential for the use of AI to save time in our professional roles:  writing SOAP notes, providing the background for intervention plans, generating bullet points for a patient education flyer, creating a quick script for a podcast episode.

However, as doctoral students and those who perform research, we must also be cognizant of the need to ensure that one's scholarly work is one's own.  Some publishers have already made firm statements that AI-generated writing will not be accepted for publication.

 

As such, until we have more concrete guidance in this area and a better understanding of the intellectual property of AI-generated text, it is important that any student intending to publish work be careful to ensure that all scholarly work intended for future publication -- and any previous work of their own that they cite in more recent work intended for publication -- is free from AI generated content for now.

If You Use AI Generated Content

Note:  the following information is meant as a guide and one should not assume that just because the information is provided, that it suggests that using AI generated content is acceptable at CGI.  


Before you start

Any use of AI-generated content should be discussed with an instructor prior to inclusion in scholarly work.  

Any content that is generated by AI, such as ChatGPT, should be cited appropriately.

Why should I reference ChatGPT content?

References tell your reader where your information came from and how you used it in your work. If you use content created by a tool like ChatGPT, including it in your References, as you would with any other source, is the responsible thing to do. If you use ChatGPT to help write or structure your paper, even if you do not otherwise quote or paraphrase its content, you will likely wish to acknowledge your use of it in some manner. This provides transparency to your reader.

How will my instructor know?

As of April 2023, Turnitin provides an AI detection tool that assesses your work and returns an evaluation of how much text has been generated by AI.

Citing AI-Generated Content

The American Psychological Association (APA) issued this guidance for citing Chat GPT on April 7, 2023:

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications, with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

Example:

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

 

Reference

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


Breaking It Down

The APA considers ChatGPT to be similar to software, so that is the reference template upon which citing ChatGPT and other AI is built (Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10)).

Author The company - OpenAI - is cited as the author, not ChatGPT.
Date The date is the year of the version you used.  An exact date is not needed; the year is enough.
Title Because it is software, the title is the name of the software and is italicized in your reference.  There is no need to indicate version (ChatGPT-4, etc) as this will be indicated later in the reference in the version number.
Version The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.
Descriptor Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited.  In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.
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. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat. For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

The APA further advises:

  • Authors using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research should consider making scrutiny of the primary sources a standard process, as the accuracy of any sources cited by ChatGPT is not guaranteed.
  •  If the sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it may be better to read those original sources to learn from that research and paraphrase or quote from those articles, as applicable, than to use the model’s interpretation of them.
  • This is an ongoing discussion and the guidelines above may well shift as more is learned and decided about ChatGPT.

McAdoo, T. (2023, April 7). How to cite ChatGPT. American Psychological Association.  https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

Recommended: An Appendix

This technology is new and we are all learning about generative AI resources and how to ethically use them.

Consider making the ChatGPT conversation retrievable by including the text as an appendix to your submitted work. 

The APA suggests that you put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

Example:

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

 

Reference

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