The General Structure MLA Recommends
MLA's guidance for citing generative AI follows the organization's general principle of describing what you used, who made it, and how you accessed it — applied to a tool rather than a traditional author. The recommended structure generally includes: a description of the prompt you used to generate the content, the name of the AI tool, the version or date of the specific model used, the company that created the tool listed as publisher, and the date you accessed it.
This differs from citing a webpage or a book because the AI tool is both the 'author' and the 'publisher' in MLA's framework, and because the same prompt given to the same tool on a different day can produce a different response — which is why MLA's guidance also recommends noting the date of generation specifically, not just a general access date.
When You're Actually Required to Cite AI Use
Citation is generally expected whenever AI-generated content appears directly in your paper — a quoted or paraphrased response, an image, or any output presented as part of your argument or analysis. Using an AI tool purely as a writing aid — for brainstorming, grammar checking, or as a thinking partner without including its specific output in your paper — is treated differently by most instructors and institutions, and specific policy on this varies, so checking your instructor's or institution's specific AI use policy alongside MLA's citation guidance is the safest approach.
Where AI-generated content is used as a source — for example, ChatGPT's explanation of a concept that's included or closely paraphrased in your paper — both an in-text citation and a full Works Cited entry following the structure above are expected, the same as any other cited source.