How to Cite an AI-Generated Video

APA does not currently publish a dedicated example for this exact source type. The format below applies APA's current AI citation principles to this source.

What APA does publish is two worked AI forms: an AI tool — Google. (2025). Gemini 3 Flash [Large language model]. https://gemini.google.com — and an AI chat, which adds the day and a title and moves the tool's name after the brackets. See APA's AI references examples page and its reference-formats post and judge for yourself. The entry below is APA's chat form element for element — company, full date, a description in the title slot, a bracketed label, the tool and the link. What is ours is the label itself: [AI-generated video] appears in no APA example. APA permits the swap in so many words — "other descriptions are possible; use the description that best fits the type of AI model or tool used", and, of the chat form, "Adapt the wording within square brackets as needed" — so treat [AI-generated video] as the wording Citation[Z] chose under that permission, and use your instructor's if they prefer another.

Company (as author) → date → clip description → [AI-generated video] → the model → link. The generator builds this from Manual Entry → AI-generated video.

An AI-generated video is a clip produced by a text-to-video model — OpenAI's Sora, Google's Veo, Runway, Pika — from a written prompt. Generative video went mainstream in 2025–26, and students are now dropping these clips into presentations, projects, and explainers. That's the why-now: it's brand-new, it has no human filmmaker to credit, and AI-disclosure rules apply to video just as they do to text and images.

A citation records which model made the clip and when — and protects you under your school's integrity policy.

• Author — the company that made the tool (OpenAI for Sora, Google for Veo), never the model and never the clip. There's no human director, but that does not promote the model: APA's rule is that an AI "cannot be an author because it is not a living, conscious human who can give consent", while the author element is whoever is "responsible for a work" — the company. MLA goes further and doesn't treat the tool as an author at all.
• Description / title — a short description of the clip, or your prompt.
• Model — name the model (Sora, Veo 3) so the citation pins what generated the clip, and put it where the tool's name goes rather than in a parenthetical. These are model names, not version numbers, and APA retired the version parenthetical as a default in September 2025. MLA differs: it keeps a Version element for the model — though when the tool's name already is the model, as with Sora and Veo 3, naming the tool has already done that job.
• [AI-generated video] — the bracketed label marking it as machine-generated.
• Source & link — a share link if there is one; otherwise the tool name and the date you generated it. Note the runtime if it's relevant.

Generated videos often don't have a stable public URL — they may live only in your account or your export. When there's no shareable link, name the tool as the source, give the date, and keep the prompt in a note so the work is documented. If the clip is part of your submission, reference it in an appendix.

MLA has not published a video example either. Its only visual example is a still image, and it is offered as a figure caption under section 1.7 of the handbook rather than as a works-cited entry — see citing generative AI, updated and revised. So keep the company, the model and the date, expect the bracketed label to be the part that settles last, and check whether your assignment wants a caption instead of a reference. For a specific tool, see how to cite Sora.