A recent article in the journal Nature discusses how the possibility of AI-assisted writing and reviewing is expected to transform the nature of the scientific paper.
According to the article, many researchers are already using chatGPT to write their scientific articles, including radiologist Domenico Mastrodicasa, at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, who told Nature, “I use it as a sounding board. I can produce a publication-ready manuscript much faster.”
A study by the journal found that only a small number of researchers were currently using the ChatGPT or other AI tools. However, many experts believe that these AI-assisted tools will become more common in writing manuscripts, peer-reviewed reports, and grant applications.
Michael Eisen, a computational biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who is also editor-in-chief of the journal eLife, told the journal, “It’s never really the goal of anybody to write papers — it’s to do science. He predicts that generative AI tools could even fundamentally transform the nature of the scientific paper”.
Laura Feetham, who oversees peer review for IOP Publishing in Bristol, UK, which publishes physical-sciences journals, told “Anything disruptive like this can be quite worrying”.
Digital publishers are also worried as well. Daniel Hook, chief executive of Digital Science, a research-analytics firm in London, told “The accessibility of generative AI tools could make it easier to whip up poor-quality papers and, at worst, compromise research integrity. Publishers are quite right to be scared.”
A spokesperson for Science reportedly told Nature that LLMs such as ChatGPT could exacerbate the paper-mill problem. “Many editors are concerned that generative AI could be used to more easily produce fake but convincing articles. Companies that create and sell manuscripts or authorship positions to researchers who want to boost their publishing output, known as paper mills, could stand to profit,” the journal wrote.
Tatsuya Amano, a conservation scientist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, told Nature “The use of AI tools could improve equity in science.” Amano and his colleagues surveyed more than 900 environmental scientists who had authored at least one paper in English.
Researchers use of AI-assisted tools to write scientific papers has reportedly already created a peer-review challenge. But, Christoph Steinbeck, a chemistry informatics researcher at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, has found ChatGPT Plus handy for creating quick summaries for preprints he’s reviewing, and notes that preprints are already online, and so confidentiality is not an issue.
Wiley, a publisher, expressed ethical concerns about the AI-generated paper, told Nature, “it was closely monitoring industry reports and litigation claiming that generative AI models are harvesting protected material for training purposes while disregarding any existing restrictions on that information.”