Information has Value

The Information has Value frame indicates that learners who are developing their information literacy skills need to “learn the importance of giving credit to the original ideas of others through proper attribution and citation.”10 As more learners use ChatGPT for citation assistance, they will need to be extremely careful to verify accuracy of all citations. As explained above, ChatGPT does not always provide factual information. For example, if you ask ChatGPT to give you a list of scholarly articles on a particular topic, it will list articles with full citations, including DOIs. The articles appear to be related titles from reputable-sounding journals. However, if you Google each of the articles, you will discover that some of them do not exist. ChatGPT will automatically generate nonexistent articles through predictive language modeling, making article titles appear genuine, even if they are not. If you ask it to give you citations for scholarly articles on the topic of higher education and information literacy, it will give you several citations that look very convincing. Here is an example:

If a student were to take this AI response and incorporate those citations into a paper or assignment, they would include some nonexistent articles. Students citing articles they have not read of course is a problem, but students citing fake articles that cannot be read compounds the problem. As students become creators of information themselves, they will need to accurately cite all information that they use, not only for the ethical and moral good, but also for the sake of their own reputation in their field(s). ChatGPT is a minefield when it comes to citation, and we would not recommend students use it for that purpose. However, asking ChatGPT to generate citations like this in an in-class exercise and discussing the results with students can help them to see the minefield for what it is and navigate around it.