[ipieter]

Our university recently recommended the same thing, and I think this is a very bad idea for two reasons.

1. Not every sequence of words deserves to be cited. GPT-3 and ChatGPT are often confidently wrong about facts, why would you want to add a citation to this? When writing a paper, this needs to be fact-checked anyways, so why not add the original (actual) source?

2. It also breaks the citation graph. Imagine all papers now point to a catch-all reference from OpenAI (2023). Adding a citation is about saying where you got certain information from and this current format doesn't give enough to do that, it just points to the catch-all. With any other citation you can either look up the paper or—in the rare case of personal communication in a citation—ask the cited source directly. You can't ask chatGPT "hey, why did you say this in paper X" and expect a meaningful answer.

[pests]

I find this very odd too.

If I search google and it gives me an instant answer at the top (which is some snippet of an actual site or article)...

It feels like I should cite google as the source for that info if I follow the same guidelines as we are discussing here.