How can I tell if a Generative AI system (chatbot) got its information from a specific website or other source?

Many AIs will now cite their sources, either automatically or upon request.

Sometimes, a chatbot will say it compiled info from multiple sources and so no citation is needed., This can be inaccurate. 

If the information comes from a single source, it's best to be able to view and cite that source, not the chatbot.

Ways to guess or investigate whether information may have come  from a particular single source:

• Two or more chatbots produce nearly identical paragraphs
• A more efficient way of discovering if this has happened (and of consulting the original source!) is to paste language from the answer into a search engine like Google. For instance, you may find the web page where the information was taken from. 

Each AI chatbot has different levels of reliability, and different prompts will get different results.  (Harvard faculty, staff and students may request a consultation with a librarian to review the chatbot you’re interested in.)

It is important to verify these sources. In addition to sometimes being set to speculate, AIs are only as correct as their training data, and any part of that data can be contradictory, incorrect, or out of date. While AIs are amazing, and can revolutionize our work, it's important to be aware of both their features and limitations.