Creating sources for information produced by ChatGPT?

[N Merrick]

I've been using ChatGPT to help decipher the words that I can't read on old documents. It's been way more successful than I expected it to be, and it's also giving me lots of context about the words I'm enquiring about.

Obviously I'm fact checking the info Chat gives me, but I'm wondering how best to record the additional info.

To give an example, I asked Chat the following:

"Hi, I keep seeing an occupation that looks like it says 'Arsenal Ganger'. They are for people who likely work at the Royal Arsenal, but I'd like to know what the occupation is please."

Chat responded with:

"An Arsenal Ganger is almost certainly referring to someone who worked at the Royal Arsenal as a gang leader or foreman overseeing a group of workers.

The term “ganger” was commonly used in industrial settings during the 19th and early 20th centuries to describe someone in charge of a “gang” of labourers. At the Royal Arsenal, this could mean supervising a team working on tasks such as munitions production, equipment manufacturing, or general labour within the site.

Gangers typically didn’t perform the manual labour themselves but were responsible for ensuring the work was done efficiently and according to orders, making them an essential link between workers and management.

If you’d like to explore what specific roles they may have had at the Royal Arsenal during your ancestors’ time, let me know! The Arsenal was a hub of diverse trades and skills."

This info isn't just relevant to one source or person, but it's info that helps me better understand the roles my ancestors held and how they lived. I'd ideally like to be able to store this info and be able to reference it when I want to attach it to a person. In the above example I would want to reference the info each time I find someone with the profession of 'Ganger'.

I'm leaning towards creating a new source each time ChatGPT gives me new information, but I'm quite strict about referencing sources correctly and the idea of citing an AI, albeit a fact checked one, doesn't quite sit right.

What are people's thoughts on creating sources from artificial intelligence? And if you don't like the idea, what would you do instead?

[Deena B]

I've been keeping notes like this in logs and keeping track of wherever I found the information. I would suppose that ChatGPT is a source like any other one you might find randomly on the internet in the sense of someone compiling the information. I have been tracking some places this way and some occupations. I like your idea though of having a source that you can link and then have a footnote for when you make reports but often I have multiple sources over time that I'm gathering facts from so I don't know how to accomplish that with one source. For example if ChatGPT gave you that description and you then followed some of the references (I use Perplexity which I like because it gives source references), then you gathered some additional information and changed, it the content would be a combination of sources. (also there are different versions of ChatGPT so if you are going to cite it, you might record which version and/or you might see if you can do an output in the form of a PDF that you store linked to your source.

[Ken Piper]

I ask Clyde, my ChatGPT assistant, to cite all sources when he reports back and include the appropriate links to the source. He's taken to doing that without asking lately.