Can we ethically use #AI in #academicwriting?

I’m teaching an academic writing course for the Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Programme. It is Week 11 of the 12-week course, and we focused on editing academic writing. During the session, we considered mistakes commonly made by junior academic writers and discussed strategies to improve the writing process.

One aspect of academic writing we spent time discussing was artificial intelligence tools (AI), and how academics can ethically engage with AI to help with the paper writing process.

ChatGPT is the latest in a series of artificial intelligence algorithms known as “large language models”. It has been trained on hundreds of millions of lines of text from the internet and uses this “training set” to generate text predictions in response to prompts or questions. Since the release of ChatGPT in November 2022, there has been intense debate in the academic community about the ethics of using large language models in scientific manuscripts. ChatGPT has been listed as an author on papers posted to pre-print servers such as medrXiv and has achieved infamy by being banned by some academic journals.

Using AI programmes such as ChatGPT to assist with writing raises important questions about academic integrity, and how authors maintain originality and authenticity in their writing.

During my teaching session, we discussed ways in which junior academic writers could ethically use AI programmes to support their paper writing. Some examples include:

Inspiration: Most academics find starting to write an academic paper challenging. Knowing that we must fill the blank page with thousands of carefully crafted words can feel daunting. This feeling can be particularly acute when it’s early in your career. Getting those first few sentences down can feel like climbing Mount Everest. Novice writers often spend disproportionate time crafting the perfect first sentence. ChatGPT can help solidify ideas by entering prompts and editing the generated texts. One way to start is by entering keywords, research objectives or hypotheses and asking ChatGPT to generate ideas for the introduction helping to overcome early stumbling blocks.

Organisation: Develop a scaffold outline for each section of your manuscript. Once you have begun to generate your ideas on the page, you can use ChatGPT to help organise and develop a structure for your manuscript. You can use a writing exercise such as freewriting (an approach developed by Peter Elbow to help academics generate text) and then build on this using prompts in ChatGPT to develop headings and sub-headings to help organise your ideas more coherently.

Editing: Some excellent editors offer a wide range of beneficial services… but usually at a cost (monetary for professional editors, or time for supervisors and colleagues). Novice writers often have their academic papers rejected early in submission because their work does not sufficiently follow academic writing principles. Using ChatGPT to help edit sentences, by feeding the programme text written by students, and prompting the programme to remove superfluous words and make sentences more concise. This could help speed up the editing process without asking the programme to generate sentences from scratch, which crosses an ethical line. Using ChatGPT will not replace an editor, but it can help authors, particularly those who use English as a second language – or have dyslexia – to edit their sentences quickly. Switching to an AI programme such as Paperpal that comprehensively checks manuscripts for language and technical and grammatical style before paper submission could help to diversify academic publishing by giving authors a better chance at success. To successfully write academic papers, you need to engage deeply with your subject matter, writing extensively in your field, to present empirical findings you need to have rigorously analysed your data and demonstrate you have done this. AI programmes will do none of this work. They have significant limitations in terms of accuracy, context, and bias, they may suggest inaccurate information. ChatGPT should not be used for referencing academic papers. Therefore, use AI software to help bring out the best in your academic writing, but it does not replace critical thinking, which still requires many work hours.