ChatGPT as an Author in Research Papers?

ChatGPT

Date that article was published: January 18, 2023

Summary of Article

The ChatGPT article discusses how this A.I. chatbot has made its “formal debut” in the world of scientific literature and how this is a central controversy that is shaking up modern society.

First off, what is ChatGPT and who is its maker?

ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that was created by the tech company OpenAI. Users can have conversations with this chat bot, but it can also solve problems, write essays, and more- which is shaking up the educational systems. ChatGPT was trained to be able to have a human-like dialogue with its user and was trained to follow instructions prompted by the user and provide detailed responses and answers.

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ChatGPT- a Friend?

ChatGPT- a Friend? 

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OpenAI's Chat Bot

OpenAI’s Chat Bot

OpenAI and DALL-E

OpenAI has also created DALL-E (and DALL-E 2) that is an A.I. system that generates images and art from text descriptions the use can input. For example, if the user inputs the text “an armchair in the shape of an avocado”, the A.I. will generate variations of the image description.

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DALL-E

DALL-E 

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Example of an Image Generation

Example of an Image Generation

Arguments Made by the Article

  • Some editors/publishers apologize that ChatGPT was credited as a co-author on their research papers/journals and that it was an error on their part
    • Others proudly give credit to A.I. systems and praise ChatGPT for writing much better articles than previous generations of A.I. tools
  • The controversies lay in publishing policies and that people believes that ChatGPT does not meet the standards for authorship
    • There are clear authorship guidelines already set in place:
      • A co-author must make a “significant scholarly contribution” to the article
        • Some agree ChatGPT follows this guideline
      • A co-author must have the capacity to agree to be a co-author and take responsibility for a study (or the part it contributed to at least)

Author Information

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Chris Stokel-Walker

Chris Stokel-Walker

Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist in Newcastle, UK. He has authored many articles and a few books such as YouTubers: How YouTube Shook up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars, and TikTok Boom: China’s Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, New Scientist, The Guardian, WIRED, Nature, Economist, The Times of London, and other publications.

My Opinions

I personally think that this issue is both scary and quite comical at the same time. In some ways I lean towards giving ChatGPT co-authorship because it seems weird to be giving the real human author all the credit if they used generative A.I. to write for them. However, the question really is- who is the mastermind behind all of this? Is it the A.I. or is the human giving the trained A.I. inputs? When considering this questions, my opinions start to sway. I can’t say I have a strong, definitive opinion to this topic- but I can confidently admit how scary the future implications of ChatGPT is, especially in the educational context. For instance, will admissions officers be able to detect if a high schooler used generative A.I. to write their college essay? Hopefully there will be ways to get around this issue… Or will the system of our society have to accept this new era- this new future- and have to try and work with it instead of against it?

Random Plots

Orange plot

plot(Orange$age, Orange$circumference, main = "Age vs. Circumference of Orange Trees", xlab = "Age of Orange Tree", ylab = "Circumference of Orange Tree", col = "dark orange")