Publisher policies
The editors-in-chief of Nature and Science told Nature’s news team that ChatGPT doesn’t meet the standard for authorship. “An attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs,” says Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature in London. Authors using LLMs in any way while developing a paper should document their use in the methods or acknowledgements sections, if appropriate, she says.
“We would not allow AI to be listed as an author on a paper we published, and use of AI-generated text without proper citation could be considered plagiarism,” says Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of the Science family of journals in Washington DC.
The publisher Taylor & Francis in London is reviewing its policy, says director of publishing ethics and integrity Sabina Alam. She agrees that authors are responsible for the validity and integrity of their work, and should cite any use of LLMs in the acknowledgements section. Taylor & Francis hasn’t yet received any submissions that credit ChatGPT as a co-author.
The board of the physical-sciences preprint server arXiv has had internal discussions and is beginning to converge on an approach to the use of generative AIs, says scientific director Steinn Sigurdsson, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in University Park. He agrees that a software tool cannot be an author of a submission, in part because it cannot consent to terms of use and the right to distribute content. Sigurdsson isn’t aware of any arXiv preprints that list ChatGPT as a co-author, and says guidance for authors is coming soon.