While generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology has become increasingly competitive since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, its widespread use poses significant ethical challenges in research. Excessive reliance on tools like ChatGPT may intensify ethical concerns in scholarly articles. Therefore, this article aims to provide a comprehensive narrative review of the ethical issues associated with using AI in academic writing and to inform researchers of current trends. Our methodology involved a detailed examination of literature on ChatGPT and related research trends. We conducted searches in major databases to identify additional relevant articles and cited literature, from which we collected and analyzed papers. We identified major issues from the literature, categorized into problems faced by authors using nonacademic AI platforms in writing and challenges related to the detection and acceptance of AI-generated content by reviewers and editors. We explored eight specific ethical problems highlighted by authors and reviewers and conducted a thorough review of five key topics in research ethics. Given that nonacademic AI platforms like ChatGPT often do not disclose their training data sources, there is a substantial risk of unattributed content and plagiarism. Therefore, researchers must verify the accuracy and authenticity of AI-generated content before incorporating it into their article, ensuring adherence to principles of research integrity and ethics, including avoidance of fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism.
Purpose This study aimed to examine the following overarching issues: the current status of research and publication ethics training conducted in Korean academic organizations and what needs to be done to reinforce research and publication ethics training.
Methods A survey with 12 items was examined in a pilot survey, followed by a main survey that was distributed to 2,487 academic organizations. A second survey, which contained six additional questions, was dispatched to the same subjects. The results of each survey were analyzed by descriptive statistical analysis, content analysis, and comparative analysis.
Results More than half of the academic organizations provided research and publication ethics training programs, with humanities and social sciences organizations giving more training than the others (χ2=11.190, df=2, P=0.004). The results showed that research and publication ethics training was held mostly once and less than an hour per year, mainly in a lecture format. No significant difference was found in the training content among academic fields. The academic organizations preferred case-based discussion training methods and wanted expert instructors who could give tailored training with examples.
Conclusion A systematic training program that can develop ethics instructors tailored to specific academic fields and financial support from academic organizations can help scholarly editors resolve the apparent gap between the real and the ideal in ethics training, and ultimately to achieve the competency needed to train their own experts.
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Influence of artificial intelligence and chatbots on research integrity and publication ethics Payam Hosseinzadeh Kasani, Kee Hyun Cho, Jae-Won Jang, Cheol-Heui Yun Science Editing.2024; 11(1): 12. CrossRef
At the end of 2022, the appearance of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with amazing writing ability, caused a great sensation in academia. The chatbot turned out to be very capable, but also capable of deception, and the news broke that several researchers had listed the chatbot (including its earlier version) as co-authors of their academic papers. In response, Nature and Science expressed their position that this chatbot cannot be listed as an author in the papers they publish. Since an AI chatbot is not a human being, in the current legal system, the text automatically generated by an AI chatbot cannot be a copyrighted work; thus, an AI chatbot cannot be an author of a copyrighted work. Current AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are much more advanced than search engines in that they produce original text, but they still remain at the level of a search engine in that they cannot take responsibility for their writing. For this reason, they also cannot be authors from the perspective of research ethics.
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ChatGPT, yabancı dil öğrencisinin güvenilir yapay zekâ sohbet arkadaşı mıdır? Şule ÇINAR YAĞCI, Tugba AYDIN YILDIZ RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi.2023; (37): 1315. CrossRef