Citing Generative AI

Modern Language Association (MLA) style is commonly used to write papers and cite sources for disciplines within the humanities. It's developed and maintained by the Modern Language Association of America.

Learn more about the style at the MLA Style Center, use the MLA Handbook online or check out the MLA section of our Citing Sources guide.

MLA uses a template of core elements instead of a more rigid citation structure, which allows for quick adaptation with new sources and technologies.

MLA has a very in-depth blog post with many examples. They recommend that you should:

• Cite a generative AI tool whenever you paraphrase, quote, or incorporate into your own work any content (whether text, image, data, or other) that was created by it 
  • This means that along with citing usage of text-based tools like ChatGPT or Gemini, you should also be citing usage of AI image, music, and other generators.
• Acknowledge all functional uses of the tool (like editing your prose or translating words) in a note, your text, or another suitable location 
  • This includes tools such as Grammarly, which has incorporated AI into their suite of tools
• Take care to vet the secondary sources it cites, as generative AI consistently creates false information, makes up sources, and removes context

When citing images created by generative AI, use the normal caption process, as with other sources. 

Using the MLA Template:

Author

We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. This recommendation follows the policies developed by various publishers, including the MLA’s journal PMLA. 

Title of Source

Describe what was generated by the AI tool, including information about the prompt in the Title of Source element if you have not done so in the text. (e.g. "Generate a Title of a Mystery Novel Starring A Young Woman" prompt.)

Title of Container

Use the name of the AI tool itself. (e.g., ChatGPT, DALL-E, etc).

Version

Name the version of the AI tool as specifically as possible. For example, the examples in this post were developed using ChatGPT 3.5, which assigns a specific date to the version, so the Version element shows this version date.

Publisher

Name the company that made the tool.

Date

Give the date the content was generated.

Location

Give the general URL for the tool. 

The links provided to you by tools such as ChatGPT are locked to your login and cannot be accessed by others, so if you are unable to provide a more general link (using another tool, such as ShareGPT or A.I. Archives) then give a generic link to the tool itself. DALL-E, however, does allow users to create a unique sharable link directly to the generated image, and that URL should be used in that case.

In-text citations in MLA consist of author and page number. If there is no author, such as in the case of generative AI when cited in MLA, you will substitute the title, and omit the page number. We recommend you visit the MLA Handbook blog post covering generative AI citation to see more examples and explanations. 

An in-text citation from ChatGPT might look like this:

Note the title, as described in the template above, in parenthetical.

Your works-cited list entry would look as follows:

“Describe the symbolism of the green light in the book The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald” prompt. ChatGPT, 13 Feb. version, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, chat.openai.com/chat. 

For images, you'll create a caption. After you've inserted the image, your caption might look as follows:

Fig. 1. “Pointillist painting of a sheep in a sunny field of blue flowers” prompt, DALL-E, version 2, OpenAI, 8 Mar. 2023, labs.openai.com/.

Note: you can instead choose to put this in your works cited list, rather than as a caption (you can read more about this in the MLA handbook in section 1.7).