Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum
AI was author of research paper (controversy) + That viral screed against peer review - Printable Version

+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Junk Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-88.html)
+--- Thread: AI was author of research paper (controversy) + That viral screed against peer review (/thread-13535.html)



AI was author of research paper (controversy) + That viral screed against peer review - C C - Jan 23, 2023

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00107-z

EXCERPT: . . . Publishers and preprint servers contacted by Nature’s news team agree that AIs such as ChatGPT do not fulfil the criteria for a study author, because they cannot take responsibility for the content and integrity of scientific papers. But some publishers say that an AI’s contribution to writing papers can be acknowledged in sections other than the author list. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its journal team and its publisher, Springer Nature.)

In one case, an editor told Nature that ChatGPT had been cited as a co-author in error, and that the journal would correct this.

ChatGPT is one of 12 authors on a preprint about using the tool for medical education, posted on the medical repository medRxiv in December last year.

The team behind the repository and its sister site, bioRxiv, are discussing whether it’s appropriate to use and credit AI tools such as ChatGPT when writing studies, says co-founder Richard Sever, assistant director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory press in New York. Conventions might change, he adds... (MORE - missing details)


I Wrote a Viral Screed Against Peer Review. I Got Some Emails.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/01/peer-review-critique-scientists-controversy.html

INTRO (Adam Mastroianni): In November, I published a scientific paper by uploading a PDF to the internet, and people were like, “Nice paper, here are some thoughts!”

A month ago, I wrote what became my young newsletter’s most popular post, saying peer review is a failed experiment and that one alternative is to upload PDFs to the internet, and some people were like “Hold on there, buster!”

A tenured professor hinted she might try to get me fired. A person with a Ph.D. accused me of “cynical metacognitive polywaffle,” which a good name for a postmodern noise band. I got some weird and vaguely threatening emails, including one that had a screenshot of my personal website with my improv experience highlighted as proof that I am literally a clown. Which is, I guess, true.

To recap, I argued in that post about peer review that:
  • We've published science lots of different ways for a long time, and universal prepublication peer review is both pretty new and historically strange.
  • That system doesn’t seem to accomplish the goals that it claims to or that we wish it would.
  • It’s worthwhile to try other things.
At its core, this is an argument against scientific monoculture. Why should everyone publish the same way? You’d have to be extremely certain that way was better than all other ways—and that it was better for every single person!—and that amount of certainty seems pretty loony to me. Uploading a PDF to the internet worked for me, but there are lots of other ways people could communicate their findings, and I hope they try them out.

This generated, in addition to the threats, some great comments. Thanks to everyone who wrote! Here are some responses... (MORE - details)

RELATED (scivillage): https://www.scivillage.com/thread-13374-post-55288.html#pid55288


RE: AI was author of research paper (controversy) + That viral screed against peer review - confused2 - Jan 25, 2023

The idea of just publishing papers on the Internet seems fun but how would anyone ever find them? You'd rapidly need some way to organise them into subject and quality where 'quality' would be determined by some sort of review process which would be back to where we started with Nature except with a different name.