981. Major style guides now have advice on when and how you should cite AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. We look at what you need to include in your writing so you're handling this kind of information credibly and professionally. Then, we take a linguistic safari through the world of animal terminology, including the histories and nuances behind words such as "critter," "varmint," and "beast."
981. Major style guides now have advice on when and how you should cite AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. We look at what you need to include in your writing so you're handling this kind of information credibly and professionally. Then, we take a linguistic safari through the world of animal terminology, including the histories and nuances behind words such as "critter," "varmint," and "beast."
| The "critters" segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.
| Edited transcript with links: https://grammar-girl.simplecast.com/episodes/punctuation-noun-clusters/transcript
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, I have a practical segment about citing artificial intelligence, and a fun piece about our names for critters.
by Mignon Fogarty
ChatGPT and other chatbots like Claude and Gemini have seen stunningly rapid adoption in the last year or so. You probably remember all the AI-related words in our word-of-the-year episode a few months ago. And a January survey by MuckRack found that 64% of PR professionals were already using AI at work, and a more recent February survey by Pew Research Center found that even among all employed Americans, which would include people who do almost no writing or editing — even in that huge and diverse group, 20% say they've used ChatGPT at work.
I absolutely believe it's going to be one of the most important developments in my lifetime — good and bad — affecting writers, editors, teachers, and other people I'd loosely call knowledge workers or creative workers. And I'll have some upcoming interviews with people about AI. But for today, instead of philosophy, I have small, nit-picky bits of advice about how to cite AI.
The editors of The Chicago Manual of Style, the MLA Handbook, and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association have all published blog posts on how they want writers to format this kind of citation.
And note that these guidelines are not for creating whole papers from AI, which is something you clearly should not do, but for when you want to cite a piece of information you got from a tool like ChatGPT.
Chicago says it's often enough to cite the tool in the text by writing something such as "The following limerick was generated by ChatGPT." But if you need a more formal citation, it says to treat the tool (such as ChatGPT or Claude) as the author and the company (such as OpenAI or Anthropic) as the publisher. For the date, you use the date you generated the material, and then you put the URL at the end.
Now, an important thing to consider is that depending on which tool you use, you may or may not be able to give readers a URL that will allow them to see the exact output you received, but if you can get that, you should include it in your citation. So it's important to get into the habit of saving that URL as you are doing your research, just as you would when you are gathering information from a website.
I don't think that's something most people think of doing yet as they're chatting with a bot, so if you think you'll be using your output in any kind of publication, remind yourself before you start that you'll need to save that URL. Some tools, like ChatGPT Plus, also let you save and name your conversations, so you may be able to go back and retrieve the URL later, again depending on what tool you're using.
So the simplest citation for Chicago style, if you're just putting a footnote or endnote on that line I said earlier about a limerick being generated by ChatGPT, that would read
1. Text generated by ChatGPT, OpenAI, April 4, 2024, https://chat.openai.com/share/c8ae8128-145c-417d-915b-96ade7821581
Chicago also gives a second option if you want to include the prompt, which can be a good idea. But sometimes the prompts get really long, so I'm not sure how workable that's going to be in every case. But … if you want to include it, Chicago recommends formatting the citation to say:
1. ChatGPT, response to “Write a limerick about the Chicago Manual of Style,” OpenAI, April 4, 2024, https://chat.openai.com/share/c8ae8128-145c-417d-915b-96ade7821581
Moving on, the MLA's blog post on the topic has some useful advice at the beginning, noting that you should cite generative AI for anything you include that was created by it — text, image, data, or something else.
And they also recommend including a citation when you take that material and quote it, paraphrase it, or incorporate it into your own work. Further, they say to acknowledge all functional uses of the tools in a note, including using AI to edit your text or using it for translation.
And finally, they say to vet the secondary sources you get from AI. For example, sometimes, AI will give you sources with links for the information it gives you. The MLA says if you want to use that information, click through on the link, and then just use the information in that source and cite that source. In the same way you would if you found a source through a Google search. Chat GPT was just the conduit to the information, not the source of the information in that case.
So when you get to actually creating the citations, MLA points you to their core citation elements, which they adapt to all different kinds of citations. These are fields such as title of the source, title of the container, date, version, and so on.
They say to include your prompt as the title of the source, and to treat the tool itself as the title of the container.
And date is tricky because they say you use the date you generated the response as the date, but then in their examples, for the version element, they also use the date of the ChatGPT version, so their examples actually have two dates in the citations. Here's an example. You start with the prompt in quotation marks and then write "prompt" after it:
“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.
And they are flexible. They basically say that as long as you can make an argument for how the elements fit into their standard set of citation elements, you're fine.
First the citations they show just write:
OpenAI. (2024). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat
They don't ask for the prompt in the citations, but say you should include the prompt in your text or in your methods section. They note you could also include your prompts and the full text of the responses in an appendix or in supplementary material. They are the only one of the three style guides I've seen that provide guidance acknowledging that both the prompts and the responses can get really long sometimes.
And like the MLA, the APA also recommends going to the original sources if you can, treating chatbots more like a search engine than the source of answers.
And on that note, I wouldn't feel right about this segment without cautioning you that AI chatbots often provide inaccurate information, and they do it in a convincing and plausible-sounding way. For example, when I asked ChatGPT to write a bio for me, it said I have a degree from UC Santa Cruz in linguistics. Well, I did take classes at UC Santa Cruz, and I do kind of work in linguistics, but I do not actually have any degree from UC Santa Cruz, nor do I have a degree in linguistics. But given my background, if you didn't know the details, you could easily believe that I did. So you have to be really careful when using information you get from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and so on. You can't just believe them no matter how plausible the answers sound. You have to confirm everything.
Finally, there's more detail in the blog posts from each of the style guides about specific situations and requirements, so you should definitely check those out if you need to get your citations exactly right, and I'll put a link to each post in the show notes, but I hope this gives you at least a good sense of how you should go about crediting your source when that source is a chatbot.
And if you're curious about the limerick ChatGPT generated about the Chicago Manual of Style, here you go:
In Chicago, where styles are a mile,
They crafted a manual with guile.
With commas and quotes,
[And] Footnotes in boats,
Their rules make the editors smile.
That was its first try. I added one word to make the meter work better, but it seemed to bring in the idea that Chicago has the Magnificent Mile and boat tours, which I thought was pretty cool.
But lest you get too impressed, I'll also tell you you that I first tried over and over to get it to make an example with a fun name for the cardboard tube that's left over when you've used all the paper towels, and after probably 10 tries I still didn't have anything remotely usable, and I gave up and switched to the limerick idea. Sometimes AI is great. And sometimes it's not.
by Samatha Enslen
We have lots of names for animals: creature, critter, varmint, vermin, beast and beastie. Here’s a rundown on where these terms came from and how they differ from one another.
Spring has sprung here in North America! We have bunnies, birds, squirrels — all kinds of critters out and about.
Which got us thinking: Where did the word “critter” come from? And how about “varmint,” “creature,” or “beast”?
We're going to find out.
One of the oldest words is “beast.” This term was used in Old English texts way back in the 1200s, and it has a few different shades of meaning even when just talking about animals. It can refer to a wild animal, like a beast in the forest. It can refer to livestock, like a beast of burden. And it can also refer to a mythical creature, like a dragon or hydra.
The diminutive of “beast” is “beastie.” In Scotland, a beastie is a goblin, ghost, or spirit. Everywhere else, it’s a cute little creature.
According to Etymonline, "beast" came to English from French and was used in Middle English to translate the Latin word "animal," for some reason replacing the Old English word for "animal," "deor." And you'll hear much more about "deor" in my interview this Thursday with Hana Videen, author of a book about medieval animals called, "The Deorhord."
“Creature” is another very old word, used way back in the 1300s. Back then, it referred to creation itself (that use is now obsolete) as well as the fruits of creation: humans and animals. Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, described the Queen of Carthage as “the fairest creature that ever was formed by nature.” He also wrote of a forest in which “there dwelled no creature save wild beasts.”
Use of “creature” to refer to humans is interesting. On the one hand, it's a term of affection: Othello, in Shakespeare’s play, says of Desdemona that “the world hath not a sweeter creature.” Yet in the same play, “creature” is used as a term of disgust: Iago refers to a loose woman as “a creature that dotes on Cassio … a huswife that by selling her desires buys herself bread and clothes.”
Perhaps this dual usage reflects the fact that we see some animals as sweet and cuddly; others, as bloodthirsty or depraved.
A variation of “creature” is “critter.” This Americanized version popped up in the 1800s. A letter that a Brit wrote to his family in England described the top floor of a house being occupied by a family, with the rooms below housing “animals, or as a Yankee would call them, ‘the critters.’” You can almost hear the disdain in his voice!
Even today, we tend to be skeptical about using “critter.” A fiction writer might put the word “critter” in the mouth of a character who is meant to be a country bumpkin or otherwise uneducated.
Another word we have for animals is “varmint.” This refers to pests: rats that carry diseases, for example, or rabbits that chew up crops. There’s even a legal sense for “varmint,” referring to destructive animals that don’t fall under normal hunting and fishing regulations.
In many states, for example, white-tail deer can be hunted only from November through January. But coyotes and wild boar can be culled anytime. This “open season” on varmints helps to control these sometimes dangerous creatures.
By the way, “varmint” comes from “vermin,” another word for noxious animals. Sometime in the 1800s, people started adding a “t” sound to the end of “vermin,” creating “varmint.” This random addition of a sound, for no linguistic reason, is called an “excrescence.” An example of this phenomenon is the “st” sound that people added to the words “amid” and “among,” creating “amidst” and “amongst.” Why did they do this? No one knows. The sounds are simply “excrescent”: extra and unnecessary. [stopped recording here]
And as you heard in our recent episode about dog and cat language, in recent years, we’ve been coming up with even more words for animals: floof, furbaby, and doggo, for example. A floof is an animal that seems to be mostly made up of fur, like a Pomeranian. A furbaby is any pet you love as much as a child, whether it’s a dog, cat, or mouse. And a doggo is just a dog … but for some reason, people seem to find it a lot more fun to say “doggo.” In 2023, Merriam-Webster agreed, adding “doggo” to their dictionary.
That segment was written by Samantha Enslen, who runs Dragonfly Editorial. You can find her at DragonflyEditorial.com.
Finally, I have a familect story. This is from a Grammarpaloozian named Duncan, but he says his brother Douglas came up with it when he was 12.
"So I'm sure you can picture how some big dogs have these sort of weird fleshy parts on the sides of their mouths. Think in particular of the St. Bernard. I guess they're actually jowls, but for whatever reason my siblings and I called them choobers. It was sort of onomatopoeia. I think we all felt like it sounded like what they ought to be called. They are chubby, chunky, rubbery little mouth bits. Choobers!"
Thanks so much Duncan, for the familect story and for supporting the show as a Grammarpaloozian.
If you want to share the story of your familect, your family dialect, a word your family and only your family uses, call the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL. It’s in the show notes, and be sure to tell me the story because that’s always the best part.
And if you're a Grammarpalooza subscriber like Duncan, you can also send a voice memo. I send text messages with fun facts a couple of times a week. It's a great way to support the show and the first two weeks are free. To sign up, visit https://joinsubtext.com/grammar or text "hello" to (917) 540-0876.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson;; audio engineer, Nathan Semes; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings; and marketing assistant, Kamryn Lacey who is going to Europe for the first time ever soon because she'll be visiting Ireland for a study abroad trip. How fun!
And I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. Remember to look for "Grammar Girl Conversations." This Thursday, I have an interview with Hana Videen, on weird medieval words for animals — real and imagined! You really want to hear why medieval people thought whales were evil.
That's all. Thanks for listening.
***
The following references for the "critter" segment did not appear in the audio but are included here for completeness.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Legend of Good Women. The Medieval & Classical Literature Library http://mcllibrary.org/GoodWomen/
Ohio Hunting and Trapping Regulations. https://ohiodnr.gov/buy-and-apply/hunting-fishing-boating/hunting-resources/hunting-regulations
Oxford English Dictionary online. Beast, beastie, creature, critter, varmint, vermin. Oed.com.
Shakespeare, William. Othello. https://www.litcharts.com/shakescleare/shakespeare-translations/othello/
Varmint Hunting for Beginners. https://discover.texasrealfood.com/hunting-for-dummies/varmint-hunting.