'Imagine my surprise when I received reviews on a submitted paper declaring that it was the work of ChatGPT. One reviewer wrote that it was “obviously ChatGPT”, and the handling editor vaguely agreed, saying that they found “the writing style unusual”. Surprise was just one emotion I experienced; I also felt shock, dismay and a flood of confusion and alarm. Given how much work I put into writing, it was a blow to be accused of being a chatbot — especially without any evidence.'
Wow. I disagree with the decision by journals that authors can't use ChatGPT to help convey their scientific discoveries more clearly.
I don't understand how it's any different than hiring an editor--something many journals recommend to authors of poorly written articles. Sure ChatGPT might make something up, but a scientific editor can similarly misunderstand the original draft and write something nonsensical.
Either way, it's up to the author to validate the product.
@MCDuncanLab @cyrilpedia I can think of lots of reasons not to let the Stochastic Parrot anywhere near the scientific publishing system. With all the litigation about copyright infringement by ChatGPT in their unethical scraping of the web, I can imagine editors would want to steer well clear of any futute legal issues, as do I!
That defense is about protecting butts, not conveying science more clearly.
I am pro-conveying science more clearly, and if AI is a good tool* to do that then yay!
*that's a big if. Considering the possibility of inadvertent plagiarism, I wouldn't recommend authors use it at this point beyond getting inspiration for a particularly hard-to-convey concept.
@MCDuncanLab @cyrilpedia I disagree that it is solely about protecting companies from liability. The folks whose writing was used without consent to build the training corpus for ChatGPT have a legitimate interest in holding OpenAI accountable. I hope they succeed, and if so then I hope that publishers do the responsible thing and avoid liability. This is interest convergence!
