Chatbots like ChatGPT are still fairly new, and instructors may have different opinions about their students' use of them. The American Psychological Association (APA) advises students to describe how they used ChatGPT – or another AI tool – in their research in a methods section or other relevant section of their paper. That appears to be sound advice, but how you document your use of ChatGPT in your paper is entirely up to your lecturer.
ChatGPT generates different responses to the same prompts (i.e., input instructing ChatGPT to generate the desired responses). Therefore, the outcomes of a ChatGPT 'chat' cannot be retrieved by the reader.
The American Psychological Association typically treats nonrecoverable sources as personal communication. However, ChatGPT's responses to prompts do not involve human communication. As such, quoting text from a ChatGPT session is more like sharing the output of an algorithm. For this reason, the author of the algorithm – the company behind ChatGPT, OpenAI – should be properly credited through an in-text citation and an entry in the reference list.
If you use information generated by AI tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot or Google Bard, you should mention this in your text and include a citation: