Generative AI (ChatGPT) for Faculty

Many instructors in higher education have plenty of questions about how generative AI will change the way we design learning experiences for students, and they way we assess learning, which includes considerations of academic integrity, chiefly plagiarism and cheating. This section of this guide includes links to resources related to ethical considerations surrounding generative AI, from academic integrity to bias to environmental impact and beyond.

APA

Below is an example of how to cite ChatGPT in APA style. Please review APA style's blog's post on citing ChatGPT for more information.

Sample reference entry:

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

• Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
  • Parenthetical citation if a transcript is available: (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).
• Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

MLA

MLA citations are composed of core elements. Below is what the MLA Style Center says about citing AI using the core elements.

• Author - "We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author."
• Title of Source - "Describe what was generated by the AI tool. This may involve including information about the prompt in the Title of Source element if you have not done so in the text."
• Title of Container - "Use the Title of Container element to name the AI tool (e.g., ChatGPT)."
• 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."

Citation example provided by the MLA Style Center:

Paraphrased in Your Prose

While the green light in The Great Gatsby might be said to chiefly symbolize four main things: optimism, the unattainability of the American dream, greed, and covetousness (“Describe the symbolism”), arguably the most important—the one that ties all four themes together—is greed.

Works-Cited-List Entry

“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.

Bias is a concern when we are using gAI, like ChatGPT. From the letters GPT, the "P" stands for "pre-trained."*  The GPT-3 model was  trained on around 45 TB of free web text data from multiple sources which include books, articles, webpages. and more. In simple terms, ChatGPT was trained on human-produced data, and thus has absorbed all of our implicit and explicit biases.

For example, a student who launches a prompt about the signs and symptoms of a pending heart attack may not realize the inherent bias in the output results; most of our heart disease research has been conducted on males, who exhibit distinctly different signs and symptoms compared to females. This bias will not be apparent, and may not be easily overcome unless the user already knows about this bias in research and can craft a prompt to compensate for that.

Still other entrenched biases may present themselves in unexpected ways, and unless a user is specifically engineering their prompts and their conversation with the chatbot in a deliberate attempt to uncover biases, bias can be subtle and play into our own predisposition for confirmation bias. 

Below is just one example that is making its way around social media, giving ChatGPT a chance to solve a classic circa 1970 gender/sex-bias riddle, and to develop some interesting rationales to explain its inconsistencies and double-standards (remember: it learned it from us). See the link to the chat transcript below, in an image format, and and accessible Word document format.

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*see the Start Here tab for definitions

In part due to the built in biases of our world, and therefore our technology and the algorithms that make them hum, technology sets us up for inequity whether it's through the access and cost of technology, or the products of technology.

Here are a few thoughts from around the Web on AI as an equity issue.

When interacting with generative AI (gAI) models, you should be cautious about supplying sensitive information, including personal, confidential or propriety information or data. AI prompts and conversations belong to the AI tool and are used in their research and development. Supplying any student information to an AI tool may be a violation of FERPA. 

Most gAI tools give a disclaimer that human employees may read prompts as part of their continuing efforts to refine the tool. 

For this reason, please:

• Do not include any PII (personal identifiable information) in your generative AI (gAI) prompts.
• Do not include student work directly into a gAI prompt
• Do not include sensitive information from our institution in a gAI prompt (HR information, student information, IT information, etc.)

This is complicated.

Since AI is trained on existing information to generate text and images, a big legal question currently underway is whether or not AI outputs are in violation of copyright law. 

Text-to-image generators including DALL-E (from Open AI, the developers of ChatGPT), responds to prompts with images instead of text. Since the AI has to get the "pieces" of the output from somewhere (the work of others, much of which is copyright protected), there are two major lawsuits underway against several text-to-image AI companies. 

Selection of articles about these lawsuits: