As more and more academic institutions grapple with the increased student and faculty use of AI, I am seeing an increasing turn towards a familiar and comfortable solution, citations.
Pretending that our new challenges can be addressed with an old paradigm slows our ability to respond to that new paradigm. More than that, there are several reasons why it is erroneous, impractical, and pointless to include AI citations in almost all circumstances. Here is a list.
1. There is no functional source.
Unlike typical cited sources, no reader can ever track down the original content. Typically, sources are cited to provide evidentiary support, but AI should never be used as evidence as it makes things up and hallucinates.
2. When a student tells a professor AI did their work for them, AI still did their work for them.
To learn, students need to do the work, not have AI do it for them. Telling your professor that you cheated does not make it okay that you cheated. Or, if AI assists a student in work outside of the learning outcomes and scope of a course, there is really no need for them to cite it in that case anyway: see the rest of this list.
3. For good reason, we have never had the expectation that writing supports and assistants need to be cited.
Students commonly receive feedback from peers, tutors, and professors which all appears in their writing uncited. When I am working on an essay and talk extensively about it with my wife, Lori, or ask for her edits, or when she rewrites a paragraph for me, in none of these circumstances am I ever expected to cite her. Caffeine is 100% responsible for this blog post – no citation. A thesaurus is never cited. Spellcheck is never cited; nor is general conscious and unconscious inspiration taken from other people, texts, writers, or works. AI is, of course, much more substantial than most of these tools, with the exception of my wife. But it belongs in this category. AI is much more like a writing support than it is like an outside source that needs a citation.
A professional editor, of course, gets credit. In this case, there is another human in the loop taking responsibility for the content of the work. Which leads to my next point:
4. The human author is 100% responsible for AI-collaborated texts.
In the end, the human author still has to decide which parts of an AI-collaborated text to include in a message. Hopefully, they engage and make good decisions to have the desired impact on their readers, but if they don’t and their text sounds like a robot wrote it, that is on them. By going through this process and making these choices, that text becomes owned by the sender. AI cannot take responsibility for any editorial choices a human makes with AI support. Regardless of how a text came about, with my wife’s help or with the help of AI, when I hit send, the text is mine. No citation necessary.
5. Citing AI is impractical to the point of being impossible.
As a writing support, the range of possibilities for how an AI can create, influence, and revise human texts is massive. From providing ideas, to helping with a single word choice, to writing or rewriting entire texts, indicating an AI’s involvement with a text is an unwieldy project. To say an AI had some influence in the creation of a text is to tell the reader almost nothing at all. To attempt to point out every single AI contribution in a truly collaborative text is to ensure a mess of referencing and signaling that is guaranteed to interfere with the purpose of writing.
6. No one is turning to the norm of citing AI anywhere in the world outside of academia.
Everywhere around us, AI usage is going uncited. From HR basics, to marketing, to drafting emails, AI is truly everywhere and becoming more ubiquitous by the day. There is no need for academia to create some false standard when the rest of the world already knows – citing AI is pointless.
It’s okay, you have my permission; you don’t need to cite your AI sources. You may move forward in this world guilt-free.
This message: somewhere between 0 and 100% AI-assisted. The responsibility: entirely mine.
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