Teaching GenAI Citation and Acknowledgement

As generative AI tools become increasingly prevalent in academic and professional environments, faculty play a crucial role in guiding students toward ethical, transparent, and intentional use. Helping students understand when and how to cite or acknowledge GenAI use is not only a matter of academic integrity—it is foundational to building critical digital literacy and professional ethics.

This guide offers practical strategies, classroom activities, and current citation guidelines to support faculty in teaching students how to engage with GenAI tools responsibly.

Explain Why Documenting GenAI Use Matters 

Integrity begins with clearly distinguishing your own ideas from the contributions of others, including those of generative AI tools. 

Help students understand citation as a foundation practice of academic and professional integrity. Emphasize that responsible citation, including documenting GenAI use, promotes: 

  • Transparency: Documenting GenAI use helps uphold academic honesty by showing how content was developed and setting the boundary between a student’s own work and the contributions of GenAI.
  • Trust: Accurate citation and process documentation allow instructors and students to verify sources, track the origin of ideas, and evaluate credibility.
  • Ethics: Responsible documentation reflects respect for intellectual property, helps prevent plagiarism, and shows a commitment to thoughtful and intentional use of emerging technologies.

Set Clear Expectations Around GenAI Use and Citation

Establish expectations early and reinforce them often. Consider the following strategies:

  • Discuss your GenAI syllabus statement and assignment guidelines. Clarify when citation or acknowledgment is required.
  • Provide specific examples of acceptable and unacceptable GenAI use across different assignments.
  • Instruct how students should cite or acknowledge GenAI use and note any additional documentation they should save.
  • Align rubrics to emphasize process, information literacy, and skill acquisition
  • Require personalized reflective statements or process logs with major assignments.
  • Contextualize GenAI use with course learning outcomes, skill acquisition, or professional development. 

Discuss the Limitations of GenAI 

GenAI tools can produce confident-sounding but inaccurate or fabricated content. Make space in your course to critically examine common limitations:   

  • Accuracy: GenAI tools may provide outdated or inaccurate information. Inform students that they are responsible for verifying any factual information, statistics, or claims generated by GenAI. Provide strategies for verifying information.
    • Suggested Activity: Assign students a short AI-generated paper and ask them to verify its references. Have them identify any errors in citation style, factual claims, or outdated terminology.
  • Authorship: AI-generated text may lack originality, use outdated or imprecise vocabulary, or gloss over nuanced analysis instructors expect to see from students. Encourage students to carefully analyze the output they receive against their voice, approaches, and methodologies. Discuss the importance of students developing their own voice independent of GenAI.
    • Suggested Activity: Ask students to examine two writing samples: one generated by GenAI and one written by a human. Have them identify textual clues that might reveal the authorship of each piece. Encourage discussion about what makes writing compelling and how AI-generated content differs from human-authored work in tone, depth, accuracy, or nuance.
  • Bias & Stereotypes: GenAI outputs may use training data or other information that could contain unacknowledged bias or stereotypes. Similarly, GenAI can make assumptions about the type of responses a user may want based on previous interactions, leading to biased or incomplete information.
    • Suggested Activity: Have students critically evaluate GenAI outputs by asking whose perspectives are represented, what might be missing, and how the language or examples reflect underlying cultural or disciplinary biases.
  • Academic and Industry Standards: Not all disciplines or professions allow the use of GenAI, particularly in the creative arts (publishing, art, theatre, music, design, etc.).  Explain to students that over-reliance on GenAI may compromise their future careers and their ability to sustain their professional and employment goals long term.
    • Suggested Activity: Provide students with an AI-generated sample relevant to their discipline and compare the sample against guidance, trends, and insights from leading disciplinary organizations. Have students discuss alignment with disciplinary conventions, jargon, methods, and professional ethics, then discuss how similar output might impact the field moving forward. 

Teach Citation and Acknowledgment Together 

Traditional citation often assumes a static, reproducible source. GenAI outputs are dynamic and shaped by specific prompts. That’s why we recommend pairing citations with acknowledgment statements that describe the process of using GenAI.

Cite GenAI 

Citation standards are still evolving, but popular style guides such as APA, MLA, and Chicago have begun to publish recommendations. Encourage students to check the guidance from their academic discipline and relevant professional organizations. 

Refer students to the UMN Libraries’ Generative AI Tools guide for discipline-specific examples.

At a minimum, a citation should include:

  • Tool name and version
  • Developer (e.g., OpenAI)
  • Date of use
  • Description of the tool’s role in the work

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

  • Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
  • Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Acknowledge GenAI Use 

Beyond basic citation, students should be encouraged to include acknowledgment statements in their work that provide space to explain how and why they used GenAI in the process of completing the task. Even if no AI-generated text appears in the final submission, acknowledgment shows how the tool may have influenced the thinking, structure, or research path behind the work. 

Acknowledgment statements are usually short paragraphs included at the end of a written document that include: 

  • A list of the GenAI tools used
  • How the tool was used to compose the final work
  • Any prompts that might be relevant to understanding the use of GenAI in the context of the final work
  • Explain how the output was verified and reviewed
  • The extent of the GenAI influence on your final product

Acknowledgment Statement Template: 

“I used [GenAI Tool Name, Version, and link] for [specific purpose]. The prompts include [list of prompts]. The output was used to [explain how AI was used]. I verified sources by [how information was fact-checked]. The final product represents a [percentage of GenAI influence on final product].” 

For a more detailed model of acknowledgment, see Kari D. Weaver’s Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework. 

When Acknowledgment May Not Be Required

There is ongoing debate about when to disclose GenAI use, particularly if the outputs are used in ways that do not meaningfully shape the content or ideas of the work, such as for formatting or spellchecking.  

Instructors should define what qualifies as “significant use” to acknowledge and encourage students to disclose when in doubt. 

Help Students Document and Share GenAI Use

Saving original prompts and outputs supports academic integrity and fosters critical reflection. 

Ask students to retain: 

  • Original, unaltered prompts used in the creation of an assignment
  • Original, unaltered outputs
  • Notes or annotations explaining how GenAI output was used or changed, if required

How to Save and Share GenAI Chat Logs 

Tools vary in how users can save and share chat logs; familiarize yourself with the best method for saving and sharing their conversations. 

  • Direct links: Direct links to conversations provide the most stability for citation, though some GenAI tools or versions may not offer this feature. For tools without this capability, the browser extension A.I. Archives saves GenAI conversations with a unique URL, allowing access to the original conversation used by the author.
  • Copy and Paste: Users can copy and paste conversations in full into another document. This may be useful for documenting informal use, though prompts and outputs may be easily altered or abridged.
  • Screenshots: Users can take screenshots of chat logs and share the images compiled in another document. This will retain the original conversation but may be altered and could pose accessibility issues. 

Additional Resources