LibAnswers

Both MLA and APA provide formats and additional guidance for citing AI generated content in a List of Works Cited or References.

MLA 9th ed.

Author: We do not recommend treating the AI tool as an author. Start citations with the Title of the Source.

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 specific AI model or model version as specifically as possible. For instance, the examples in this post were developed using the GPT-4o model of ChatGPT.

Publisher: Name the company that made the tool.

Date: Give the date the content was generated.

Location: Give the stable, shareable URL for accessing the generated content (e.g., text, an image, etc.). For example, tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E allow you to share a link by clicking the Share link at the top of the chat conversation. If the tool you are using doesn’t provide a stable, shareable URL, provide the general URL for the tool.

Example:

“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.

The MLA style guide notes “You should also take care to vet the secondary sources cited by a generative AI tool—with the caveat that AI tools do not always cite sources or, when they do, do not always indicate precisely what a given source has contributed. If you cite an AI summary that includes sources and do not go on to consult those sources yourself, we recommend that you acknowledge secondary sources in your work.”
MLA also notes “We want to add that AI tools can also hallucinate, or make up, sources or incorrectly summarize the content that it does reference. For those reasons we recommend directly consulting and citing the sources that the AI links to instead of the AI response.” [emphasis added]

APA 7

If the text that the AI program generates is retrievable or sharable (it has a persistent link) use the following model:

AI Company Name. (year, month day that the content was generated). Title of chat in italics [Description, such as Generative AI chat]. Tool Name/Model. URL of the chat.

Use the company as author, not the AI program. 

If the chat has no title, a description in square brackets (that ideally includes information on what prompts were used) would be created. 

Examples:

Google. (2025, May 22). High school grammar concepts overview [Generative AI chat]. Gemini 2.5 Flash. https://g.co/gemini/share/a1306ce12929  

OpenAI. (2023, January 17). [ChatGPT response to a prompt about three prominent themes in Emily Dickinson’s poetry]. https://chat.openai.com/....

If the text that the AI program generates is not retrievable or sharable, then it falls into APA's catch-all “personal communication” category, where you cite with an in-text only citation. Example: “(OpenAI, personal communication, January 16, 2023).”

Consider making the AI software conversation retrievable by including the text as an appendix or as online supplemental material. Refer readers to the appendix or the online supplemental material (where the AI software response may be contextualized) when the conversation is cited in your text. It would be good practice to describe, in the narrative or a note, the prompt that generated the specific AI software response.