Citations and transparency with AI

When you use an AI tool to help with lesson work, your reader deserves to know. A citation tells where the words came from, and a transparency statement explains how the AI helped. Both protect your integrity — and they protect your reader from being misled by a confident-sounding answer that has not been checked.

Five Fields Every AI Citation Needs

1. Tool — the name of the AI assistant you used (ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Claude).
2. Version — the model or version, such as GPT-4o or Gemini 1.5, when the tool tells you.
3. Date — the date you accessed the tool, because AI replies change over time.
4. Prompt — a short summary of what you asked the AI to do.
5. Author check — a note that you, the human author, verified the facts before turning it in.

A Sample AI-Assisted Citation

Transparency — Tell the Whole Story

A transparency statement is one or two honest sentences that say what the AI did and what you did. Did the AI brainstorm ideas? Did it draft a paragraph you then rewrote? Did it check your spelling? A reader can trust your work only when you say so.

• Good: "I used ChatGPT to brainstorm three opening sentences. I picked one, rewrote it in my own words, and verified the fact against my textbook."
• Good: "Gemini drafted the first paragraph from my outline. I edited every sentence and added two examples from my notes."
• Not enough: "AI helped." This hides what the AI did and what you actually wrote.
• Not enough: "All my own work." If AI shaped any sentence, this is dishonest — even if you edited it later.

Verify Before You Trust

AI tools sometimes invent facts, dates, names, and even sources — this is called a hallucination. Before you cite anything an AI told you, check the claim against a trusted human-authored source: your textbook, an encyclopedia entry, an official site, or a librarian. If you cannot verify it, do not include it.