I recently saw a link to a post on LinkedIn, in which the author argues that we shouldn't be citing chatbots, but should instead be disclosing their use. He argues that, "The proper thing to do when using a chatbot is to disclose it, for transparency, rather than cite it for attributing credit or signalling credibility." Which I agree with. But he also suggests the two reasons we cite are,
"One is that the source carries some epistemic authority. This isn't necessarily because of the author — it could be because of our trust (or at least the performance of trust) in the practice of peer review. Or maybe we're citing a statistic produced by an official body. The other reason for citing is that we want to credit the source."
And I agree with those, too, but as a librarian, niggle a little with that second one in that the reason I want people to cite is to be able to find the source, not just credit it. It works out to the same thing in the end, but in reading the post I was reminded of this excellent article, and wanted a reason to post a link to it, and update my now two-year-old(!) post on "How to cite ChatGPT". The reason, I think, we started out trying to "cite" these tools is that's what we know how to do. I don't recall anywhere else in my academic career where I had to "disclose" a source, so we just tried to shoehorn this new tool into an existing practice. But now it seems pretty obvious that this peg doesn't fit in this hole, so instead, a citation about AI Disclosure:
Weaver, K. (2024). The Artificial Intelligence Disclosure (AID) Framework: An Introduction. College & Research Libraries News, 85(10), 407. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crln.85.10.407
