“In a world where academics live by the mantra “publish or perish,” it’s unsurprising that some are using chatbots to save time or to bolster their command of English in a sector where it is often required for publication—and may be a writer’s second or third language. But employing AI technology as a grammar or syntax helper could be a slippery slope to misapplying it in other parts of the scientific process. Writing a paper with an LLM co-author, the worry goes, may lead to key figures generated whole cloth by AI or to peer reviews that are outsourced to automated evaluators.”
“These are not purely hypothetical scenarios. AI certainly has been used to produce scientific diagrams and illustrations that have often been included in academic papers—including, notably, onebizarrely endowed rodent—and even to replace human participants in experiments. And the use of AI chatbots may have permeated the peer-review process itself, based on a preprint study of the language in feedback given to scientists who presented research at conferences on AI in 2023 and 2024.”
by Carissa Véliz
Author | Keynote Speaker | Associate Professor working on AI Ethics at the University of Oxford
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