A Dozen Quotes about AI & Academic Scholarship

AI chatbots have thoroughly infiltrated scientific publishing. One percent of scientific articles published in 2023 showed signs of generative AI’s potential involvement, according to a recent analysis - Scientific American 

The journey from research data generation to manuscript publication presents many opportunities where AI could, hypothetically, be used – for better or for worse. - Technology Network

Is ChatGPT corrupting peer review? There are telltale words that hint at AI use. A study of review reports identifies dozens of adjectives that could indicate text written with the help of chatbots. - Nature 

Should researchers use AI to write papers? This group aims to release a set of guidelines by August, which will be updated every year - Science.org

Generative AI firms should stop ripping off publishers and instead work with them to enrich scholarship, says Oxford University Press’ David Clark. - Times Higher Ed 

Here are three ways ChatGPT helps me in my academic writing. Generative AI can be a valuable aid in writing, editing and peer review – if you use it responsibly - Nature 

New detection tools powered by AI have lifted the lid on what some are calling an epidemic of fraud in medical research and publishing. Last year, the number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. - DW News (video) 

Estimating the prevalence of ChatGPT "contamination” in the scholarly literature: It is estimated that at least 60,000 papers (slightly over 1% of all articles) were LLM-assisted - ArXiiv 

AI-Generated Texts from LLM has infiltrated the realm of scientific writing? We confirmed and quantified the widespread influence of AI-generated texts in scientific publications across many scientific domains - BioRxiv 

Georgetown found that American scholarly institutions and companies are the biggest contributors to AI safety research, but it pales in comparison to the amount of overall studies into AI, raising questions about public and private sector priorities. - Semafor 

Google Books is indexing low quality, AI-generated books that will turn up in search results, and could possibly impact Google Ngram viewer, an important tool used by researchers to track language use throughout history. - 404Media

The Association of Research Libraries announced a set of seven guiding principles for university librarians to follow in light of rising generative AI use. - Inside Higher Ed

18 Articles about AI & Academic Research

Could AI Disrupt Peer Review?  Publishers’ policies lag technological advances - Spectrum

The Use of Artificial Intelligence in Writing Scientific Review Articles - Springer

‘Obviously ChatGPT’ — how reviewers accused me of scientific fraud - Nature

AI could accelerate scientific fraud as well as progress - Economist  

Researchers plan to release guidelines for the use of AI in publishing - Chemical & Engineering News

ChatGPT use shows that the grant-application system is broken - Nature   

Detecting fraud in scientific publications: the perils and promise of AI - Science Pod 

The Science family of journals is adopting the use of Proofig, an artificial intelligence (AI)–powered image-analysis tool- Science Magazine  

Can ChatGPT and Other AI Bots Serve as Peer Reviewers? - ACS Publishing  

AI Use in Manuscript Preparation for Academic Journals - Cornell University 

As scientists face a flood of papers, AI developers aim to help New tools show promise, but technical and legal barriers may hinder widespread use - Science Magazine  

Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science? – Nature  

Affiliation Bias in Peer Review of Abstracts by a Large Language Mode - JAMA

AI copilots and robo-labs turbocharge research - Axios 

Editing companies are stealing unpublished research to train their AI - Times Higher Ed 

How journals are fighting back against a wave of questionable images - Nature  

Can ChatGPT evaluate research quality? - Cornell University   

The JSTOR Daily Sleuth - Jstor

15 Articles about How Students are Using AI

Plagiarism & False Data in Academic Papers

There are countless credible accusations of (academic) misconduct that go uncorrected; I myself have published articles challenging the integrity of hundreds of papers. The majority of them have not been retracted, corrected or even remarked upon. I would wager that most reasonably large universities (my own included) have faculty members who are known to have plagiarized, fabricated, falsified, claimed undue credit, hidden financial conflicts of interest or misbehaved in numerous other ways and who have seemingly gone unpunished."

New York University professor Charles Seife writing in the New York Times

12 Articles on Cheating with AI & AI Detectors

The Trouble With AI Writing Detection – Inside Higher Ed

College application season is here. So is the struggle to find out if AI wrote students’ essays – Cal Matters 

If using ChatGPT to write essays becomes widespread, those students who elect not to use it, who prefer to do the work themselves, may suffer a penalty for doing so. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Results of a new survey flip the early narrative on ChatGPT—that students would rush to use it to cheat on assignments and that teachers would scramble to keep up—on its head. Half of students, ages 12-18, said they have never used ChatGPT. – Ed Week

OpenAI debates when to release its AI-generated image detector – Tech Crunch

Universities Rethink Using AI Writing Detectors to Vet Students’ Work – Bloomberg 

Identifying AI’s flaws motivates students and helps them build confidence, which can discourage cheating. Pointing out where it still really messes up is very powerful for empowering students to see their own strengths as human thinkers. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students cheat out of desperation so one professor will give multi-level assignments that force students to submit papers at various stages to keep track of their progress. – Yahoo News

The AI Detection Arms Race Is On And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text—and tools to evade detection. – Wired

Simply leaving it up to students to decide whether they’re going to do the work, without further comment or intervention or negative sanction from me, is a failure of pedagogy. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI detectors have low efficiency, and simple modifications can allow even the most robust detectors to be easily bypassed. – Science Direct 

Suspicion, Cheating & Bans: AN Hits America's Schools (podcast) – New York Times

Should Students Choose Higher-Paying Majors?

Pushing students from science into the humanities tended to decrease their later-life wages — that’s finding is not surprising. But the converse also appeared to be true: Pushing students from the humanities into science also tended to, if anything, decrease their wages. While there are certain very high-paying majors (like engineering, economics, and computer science) that increase students’ earning potential even if they would prefer to study something else, helping students to study their most-preferred major generally seems to provide long-run financial benefits even in the humanities.

Students should know that when it comes to choosing a college degree, small differences in average-wage-by-major statistics shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Especially when the average wage differences between majors are not very big, students should put their own strengths first and not let the statistics cloud their understanding of their own interests.

Zachary Bleemer writing in the The Chronicle of Higher Ed

17 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Scientific authorship in the time of ChatGPT - Chemistry

AI could rescue scientific papers from the curse of jargon – Free Think

Science journals ban listing of ChatGPT as co-author on papers – The Guardian

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove – Nature (subscription req)

Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists – Nature (subscription req)

The World Association of Medical Editors has created guidelines for the use of ChatGPT and other chatbots - Medscape (sub req)  

ChatGPT: our study shows AI can produce academic papers good enough for journals – just as some ban it – The Conversation

It’s Not Just Our Students — ChatGPT Is Coming for Faculty Writing – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

As scientists explore AI-written text, journals hammer out policies – Science

AI writing tools could hand scientists the ‘gift of time’ – Nature

ChatGPT Is Everywhere Love it or hate it, academics can’t ignore the already pervasive technology– Chronicle of Higher Ed

Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT – Scholarly Kitchen

AI Is Impacting Education, but the Best Is Yet to Come – Inside Higher Ed 

AI makes plagiarism harder to detect, argue academics – in paper written by chatbot – The Guardian

How to Cite ChatGPT – APA Style

Researchers claim to have developed tool capable of detecting scientific text generated by ChatGPT with 99% accuracy – University of Kansas

ChatGPT: five priorities for research – The Journal Nature

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments                                                               

27 thoughts on teaching with AI            

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection        

14 quotes worth reading about AI use in academic papers                       

13 Quotes worth reading about AI’s impact on College Administrators & Faculty

17 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship            

14 quotes worth reading about AI use in academic papers

ScienceElsevier and Nature were quick to react, updating their respective editorial and publishing policies, stating unconditionally that ChatGPT can’t be listed as an author on an academic paper. It is very hard to define exactly how GPT is used in a particular study as some publishers demand, the same way it is near impossible for authors to detail how they used Google as part of their research. Scholarly Kitchen

An app I have found useful every day is Perplexity. I am most taken with the auto-embedded citations of sources in the response, much like we do in research papers. This is most useful for deeper digging into topics. Inside Higher Ed 

Tools such as Grammarly, Writeful, and even Microsoft grammar checker are relied upon heavily by authors. If an author is using GPT for language purposes, why would that need to be declared and other tools not? What if authors get their ideas for new research from ChatGPT or have GPT analyze their results but write it up in their own words; might that be ok because the author is technically doing the writing? I believe that self-respecting researchers won’t use GPT as a primary source the same way they don’t use Wikipedia in that manner. However, they can use it in a myriad of other ways including brainstorming, sentence construction, data crunching, and more. The onus of responsibility for the veracity of information still falls on the researcher but that doesn’t mean we should run to ban because some might use it as a way to cut corners. Scholarly Kitchen

An academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”. What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT. The Guardian

An application that holds great potential to those of us in higher ed is ChatPDF! It is what you might imagine, a tool that allows you to load a PDF of up to 120 pages in length. You can then apply the now-familiar ChatGPT analysis approach to the document itself. Ask for a summary. Dig into specifics. This will be a useful tool for reviewing research and efficiently understanding complex rulings and other legal documents. Inside Higher Ed

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, (for APA) describe (in your academic paper) how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response. You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper. APA Style 

Outside of the most empirical subjects, the determinants of academic status will be uniquely human — networking and sheer charisma — making it a great time to reread Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The US journal Science, announced an updated editorial policy, banning the use of text from ChatGPT and clarifying that the program could not be listed as an author. Leading scientific journals require authors to sign a form declaring that they are accountable for their contribution to the work. Since ChatGPT cannot do this, it cannot be an author. The Guardian

A chatbot was deemed capable of generating quality academic research ideas. This raises fundamental questions around the meaning of creativity and ownership of creative ideas — questions to which nobody yet has solid answers. Our suspicion here is that ChatGPT is particularly strong at taking a set of external texts and connecting them (the essence of a research idea), or taking easily identifiable sections from one document and adjusting them (an example is the data summary — an easily identifiable “text chunk” in most research studies). A relative weakness of the platform became apparent when the task was more complex - when there are too many stages to the conceptual process. The Conversation 

Already some researchers are using the technology. Among only the small sample of my work colleagues, I’ve learned that it is being used for such daily tasks as: translating code from one programming language to another, potentially saving hours spent searching web forums for a solution; generating plain-language summaries of published research, or identifying key arguments on a particular topic; and creating bullet points to pull into a presentation or lecture. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

For most professors, writing — even bad first drafts or outlines — requires our labor (and sometimes strain) to develop an original thought. If the goal is to write a paper that introduces boundary-breaking new ideas, AI tools might reduce some of the intellectual effort needed to make that happen. Some will see that as a smart use of time, not evidence of intellectual laziness. Chronicle of Higher Ed

The quality of scientific research will erode if academic publishers can't find ways to detect fake AI-generated images in papers. In the best-case scenario, this form of academic fraud will be limited to just paper mill schemes that don't receive much attention anyway. In the worst-case scenario, it will impact even the most reputable journals and scientists with good intentions will waste time and money chasing false ideas they believe to be true. The Register 

Many journals’ new policies require that authors disclose use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model such as ChatGPT as a co-author, to underscore the human author’s responsibility for ensuring the text’s accuracy. That is the case for Nature and all Springer Nature journalsthe JAMA Network, and groups that advise on best practices in publishing, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics and the World Association of Medical Editors. Science

Just as publishers begin to get a grip on manual image manipulation, another threat is emerging. Some researchers may be tempted to use generative AI models to create brand-new fake data rather than altering existing photos and scans. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that sham scientists may be doing this already. A spokesperson for Uncle Sam's defense research agency confirmed it has spotted fake medical images in published science papers that appear to be generated using AI. The Register

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments                                                               

27 thoughts on teaching with AI            

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection        

13 Quotes worth reading about AI’s impact on College Administrators & Faculty

17 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship                                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans

Eaton, the academic-integrity expert, cautions against trying to ban the use of ChatGPT entirely. That, she says, “is not only futile but probably ultimately irresponsible.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

I would compare this to using steroids in baseball. If you don’t ban steroids in baseball, then the reality is every player has to use them. Even worse than that, if you ban them but don’t enforce it, what you actually do is create a situation where you weed out all of the honest players. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

study surveyed 372 students seeking admission into college for fall 2023 and found that nearly half, 39% of those students, would not consider attending a college that's banned ChatGPT or other AI tools. ZDNET

Several leading academic journals and publishers updated their submission guidelines to explicitly ban researchers from listing ChatGPT as a co-author, or using text copied from a ChatGPT response. Some professors have criticized these bans as shortsightedly resistant to an inevitable technological change. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Blocking access to ChatGPT at school won’t matter, at least for any student with access to a tablet or laptop outside of school. Ed Week

ChatGPT and AI writer has been banned in educational institutions around the world, from high schools across America(opens in new tab) and Australia to universities in France and India with some university professors having caught their students using ChatGPT to write their entire assignments. Tech Radar 

A number of universities that say they are planning to expel students who are caught using the software. Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist and expert on contract cheating at Imperial College London, said many universities were “panicking”. The Guardian 

Los Angeles Unified, the second-­largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network. Others soon joined. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. MIT Tech Review

The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT in its schools, as has the University of Sciences Po, in Paris, citing concerns it may foster rampant plagiarism and undermine learning. Washington Post

Teachers at Oceana High School in Pacifica, California have sent out messages to students warning against using AI-writing software for assignments. Mashable

Washington University in St. Louis and University of Vermont in Burlington are among the institutions that have amended their academic integrity policies to include the usage of AI tools like ChatGPT. Stanford Daily 

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments            

22 examples of teaching with AI                                                           

27 thoughts on teaching with AI   

13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI                                  

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common ­­­

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%.

Jeffrey Barinard writing in Science Magazine

A ChatGPT-assisted academic paper

A ChatGPT-assisted paper is posted to the arXiv. The topic is AI use in drug discovery and the authors conclude, “AI has the potential to revolutionize the drug discovery process.”

The paper is an example of how the ChatGPT bot might be used in academic papers and offers a potential model for AI-assistance transparency. Their conclusion:

As a result of this experiment, we can state that ChatGPT is not a useful tool for writing reliable scientific texts without strong human intervention. One of the main reasons why this AI is not yet ready to be used in the production of scientific articles is its lack of ability to evaluate the veracity and reliability of the information it processes. A real risk is that predatory journals may exploit the quick production of scientific articles to generate large amounts of low-quality content. Overall, addressing the risks associated with the use of AI in the production of scientific articles will require a combination of technical solutions, regulatory frameworks, and public education.

Ditching Peer Review

If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.

Adam Mastroianni writing in Experimental History

Resisting Simple Solutions

People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated, centralized, and avoid the simple like the pest. Practitioners on the other hand have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game

Tuesday Tech Tools: 9 Tools for Writing Academic Papers

BibMe
The free version lets you create citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats. It also offers some writing suggestions. Similar to Citation Machine. A paid account for $9.95 a month you get more writing suggestions and a plagiarism checker.

Citation Machine
Popular, user-friendly citations generator. Chicago, MLA, APA, and 13 other styles. Free version, $9.95 gives you grammar and plagiarism checkers. ations, etc.

Cite This For Me
Simple layout. Create citations and bibliographies in APA, MLA, and Harvard formats for over 30 types of sources. Premium account for $15 a month gives you a plagiarism checker and Chrome extension.

Easybib
Auto-formatting of citations for research papers but MLA is the only available format from the free version. $4.99 a month for the paid version to get more styles, in-text citations, etc.

EditTeach
Resources for editing professors, students and working professionals to help strengthen the craft of editing and support the work of editors.

Opendemia
Stores notes on sources, helps to create works cited pages and in-text citations as well as auto-generate citations in various formats. There is a free version. $10 a year for no ads and more citations allowed per project.

Purdue Writing Lab
Writing and formatting help.

SuperSummary Academic Citation Resources 
Links to style guides, FAQs, tutorials, quizzes, sample papers, and tools to help students' citation and research processes.

Zotero 
Cite sources directly in a Word or Google document in thousands of formats. Organize your research by tagging sources with keywords and saving them to collections. Free.


More Tech Tools

Tuesday Tech Tools: 13 Citation Generators

If you are one of the many students getting your school start at the end of this month, here are some tools (apps and online) that will help you edit your writing (or the writing of others) especially when it comes to figuring out how to make citations. Don’t just assume the citations created by these tools are correctly done—double-check them yourself. There are more writing tools at the tech tools site. If you have other suggestions, feel free to send them my way.

Academic Help
Citation generator for MLA, APA, and Chicago formats. Basic but free.

BibMe
The free version lets you create citations in MLA, APA, and Chicago formats. It also offers some writing suggestions. Similar to Citation Machine. A paid account for $9.95 a month you get more writing suggestions and a plagiarism checker.

Citation Machine
Popular, user-friendly citations generator. Chicago, MLA, APA, and 13 other styles. Free version, $9.95 gives you grammar and plagiarism checkers. ations, etc.

Cite Fast
Cite sources in APA, MLA, or Chicago styles. Free but create an account to return to your information.

Cite This For Me
Simple layout. Create citations and bibliographies in APA, MLA, and Harvard formats for over 30 types of sources. Premium account for $15 a month gives you a plagiarism checker and Chrome extension.

Easybib
Auto-formatting of citations for research papers but MLA is the only available format from the free version. $4.99 a month for the paid version to get more styles, in-text citations, etc.

EditTeach
Resources for editing professors, students and working professionals to help strengthen the craft of editing and support the work of editors.

Opendemia
Stores notes on sources, helps to create works cited pages and in-text citations as well as auto-generate citations in various formats. There is a free version. $10 a year for no ads and more citations allowed per project.

OttoBib
Chrome extension for citing books using an ISBN. Formats include MLA, APA, AMA, and Chicago. Free.

Paperpile
Chrome extension to search and cite books using Chicago. Automatically creates a citation for a book searched in Amazon. Free.

Purdue Writing Lab
Writing and formatting help.

SuperSummary Academic Citation Resources 
Links to style guides, FAQs, tutorials, quizzes, sample papers, and tools to help students' citation and research processes.

Zotero 
Cite sources directly in a Word or Google document in thousands of formats. Organize your research by tagging sources with keywords and saving them to collections. Free.