At the foundation of academic writing, there is a given: that you and the authors you are citing have made an effort to present factual arguments with citations when applicable.

ChatGPT doesn’t do that. And so I think it should almost never be cited.

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I think of chatGPT as more of a writing coach. You tell it what you want to write about, and it puts together a sample response that, above all else, sounds convincing. If it happens to know relevant facts it will put them in (but not with citations). If chat GPT doesn’t know relevant facts, it uses made up facts as a placeholder, just to give an example of how a convincing response could be structured.

It’s then our job as an actual writer to take this sample, hunt down the relevant facts (with citations), and put forward our final argument.

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Perhaps the only time it makes sense to me to cite chatGPT is if you are explicitly writing about it as an entity.