Generative AI engages with questions of intellectual property and copyright both at the point of input and of output. Our current large language models have been trained on a corpus of work scraped from the internet, without the authors' permission. Visual tools such as Stable Diffusion and Midjourney are trained on the works of countless artists, also without consent or compensation. Some have argued that the companies developing these AI tools have infringed on their copyright protections and have sued on those grounds.
On the output side, questions of authority, authorship, and citation of genAI content continue to evolve.
The conversation around the citation of AI tools is still developing, though a few scholarly style manuals have released guidance. Click around below for that guidance as well as some arguments for and against citing AI tools in scholarly research.
Because each new interaction with an LLM (or a research assistant tool built on an LLM) produces a novel result, replicating your work is often difficult. Below are some tools for documenting your work with AI.