The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) into academic writing offers transformative opportunities but also poses complex challenges, requiring a careful balance between innovation and upholding of ethical standards. This speech will examine the dual-edged influence of AI tools, such as ChatGPT, Deep Seek, Grammarly, and DeepL Translate, in scholarly communication. We also evaluate existing policies from top-notched journals such as NEJM, Lancet and JAMA that seek to regulate their use for the authors.
AI provides extremely accelerated efficiencies which allows academics to draft manuscripts, refine language and phrasing, perform complicated data analysis, and retrieve literature at unprecedented speeds. For researchers where their native language is not English, AI plays a pivotal role in linguistics, enhancing more structured presentation and clarity. In addition, AI-driven platforms may inform identification of research gaps and generation of research hypotheses – which could help foster creativity. Nevertheless, these competitive edges are tempered by substantial concerns regarding practical and ethical considerations. Editors of Journals encounter issues related to authorship, originality, and accountability when the content of an article is completely dominated by AI: should AI be considered as a co-author? Are there any measures to avoid biases or plagiarism that may breach intellectual property rights? Will the increasingly common use of AI be downplaying critical thinking and compromising the human voice crucial to scholarly discussion?
Many reputable journals have set up stringent policies that mandate transparency, necessitating disclosure of AI usage, and do not allow AI from being listed as an author. These regulations aim to maintain accountability, ensuring researchers should remain responsible for integrity and probity. However, journal guidelines on AI use are inconsistent and may cause confusion. No software seems to be able to confidently ascertain a case of AI use despite the availability of AI similarity index.
This speech calls for a collaborative framework where investigators should leverage the potential of AI while adhering to ethical standards, and all stakeholders including the press and publishers could standardize regulations to strengthen trust. We further argue that AI should be used as a tool but not a dominant platform to compose manuscripts and proposals. Measures should be taken to encourage human intellect in writing articles to achieve scholarly excellence.
