Citing AI Tools

The focus of citing your work is not on whether or not you used AI, but on the transparency and quality of your AI use.  Using AI tools to edit, clarify, or revise your own original work for your assignment is permitted at Quantic and Valar, but you must acknowledge that use.

The business value of using AI is not in tricking people into thinking you didn't use it, it's in articulating the details of your practice so that it can be leveraged across your team, department, or company to create a meaningful competitive advantage. Being able to share what you did and how you did it is useful, hiding it isn't.

What to do

You will add two things to describe your use of AI Tools:

• AI Disclosure - this describes how you incorporated AI tools into your process. It gives your reader detail about how you used AI, how it helped, and what you learned. Even for those who did not use AI at all, an AI Disclosure statement is still required (see non-AI use example below)
• Reference Citation - provides transparency with link to AI engagement.

1. AI Disclosure

This is an acknowledgement of the ways you used AI in your work. It should go at the beginning of your work, on a page between the cover and the table of contents. You're going to do four things:

• Define your overall strategic approach for incorporating AI in your project.  

For each type of work you will

• Identify the different scopes of work (research and source discovery, citation cleanup, etc). Be specific.
• Name the specific tool and model used.

• Discuss how the tools were used - this goes beyond identifying the scope of work like 'ideation and brainstorming' to give your reader detail about how you used AI, how it helped, and what you learned.

  

Here are some examples you can edit and revise. This is not an exhaustive list. There are many ways you can use AI tools, articulating what you used them for is part of this effort.

AI Disclosure:

The following notes describes how we used AI tools in our process. We take full responsibility for the content, conclusions, and any errors in this document. 

Our Overall Approach:

We wanted to use AI agents to respond to our ideas, helping us narrow things down and get to   a starting point for deeper strategic thinking. We found we were much faster at rejecting poorly thought out, unformed ideas, and were able to quickly identify areas that held promise. 

This saved substantial time, and allowed us to focus on stress testing and refining ideas to make them stronger, rather than trying to bolster bad ideas to make them better. Overall, our approach was designed to get us to a more robust, well developed report. 

Here is a detailed description of the different ways we used text generation tools:

1. Research and Source Discovery

The authors used ChatGPT  5-mini (OpenAI) to aid in contextual research and source discovery. We started by asking who collects information on the functional foods industry in Canada, and then asked for a list of business newspapers or journals that regularly report on the topic. We discovered that quite a few 'articles' did not actually exist. This taught us to treat AI as a starting point for source discovery rather than an end point. It was far better at pointing us toward organizations and news outlets than at retrieving actual documents.

2. Ideation and Concept Refinement

The authors used Gemini - thinking (Google) to help us narrow down our idea from a broad area (sustainability) to our much more specific topic - agrisolar arrays. We asked gemini to prompt us with a series of questions about what we were interested in and why, and ask us follow up questions about specific ideas. It was incredibly helpful in eliminating broad areas, helping us hone in on what we cared the most about, and fine tune our "big idea" into something manageable.

3. Core Argument and Strategy

We did not use AI to generate any portion of our strategy or core argument. Early in our process we experimented with this, and found that the output flattened our ideas rather than sharpened them, using extremely confident text that we did not fully back. Writing the core of this project ourselves forced us to find out whether we actually understood what we were arguing.

4. Editing and Proofreading

Claude Sonnet 4.6 (Anthropic) was used as the final stop in our process, to clean up our writing and grammar. We found it to be extremely helpful in making our writing sharper, eliminating unnecessary language, and making our team speak with a cohesive voice. We asked it to review our work from three different viewpoints, that of an investor, a rival company, and a potential C-level hire. Each of these personas lead to insightful edits. We also used Claude to create Chicago Author Date compliant references, and double checked those with Gemini.

Not using AI?

If you did NOT use AI tools at all (other than for spelling), you would use a version of the disclosure statement like this:

AI Disclosure for Non AI use:

This was produced with no generative artificial intelligence (AI) or large language models (LLMs) input - LLMs were not used in the organizing, structuring, drafting, writing, editing or revision of this work, nor for idea generation or refinement, research,  creation of tables, graphs, images, or any other use of AI. The work is entirely the product of the author.

2. Add the References

Add these along with any traditional sources you have used (articles, datasets, etc) in your reference list.

Syntax:

AI Tool and model Name. AI URL. Date generated. “short description of prompt/conversation". Short description of generated material.  Accessible link to  conversation.

Example:

Google Gemini Thinking. gemini.google.com. February 7, 2023. “Exploration of current samsung galaxy tablet models” Ongoing chat with follow up questions about android tablets. https://g.co/gemini/share/847bd681fcba

Note: If your conversation links are not public, then you can copy and paste all of your prompts into an addendum and make that note in the Chatgpt reference line in the reference list. This is obviously more work, but is an alternative when the links are not available. 

Example:

Google. gemini.google.com. February 7, 2023. “Exploration of current samsung galaxy tablet models” Ongoing chat with follow up questions about android tablets. AI conversation located in Addendum A.