6 ms·

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove

55 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

newlogicblock 4y ago
I think this is totally legitimate. ChatGPT represents an aggregate intelligence and the crowd that built it, willingly or not, deserve recognition, and condemnation all the more so, depending on what ChatGPT spits out.
rsfern 4y ago
If anything it should go in the acknowledgments section, not the author list. Would you list grammarly as a coauthor?
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  Grammarly doesn't write whole pages itself.
  - rsfern 4y ago
    True, but I still think chatGPT is just a tool, maybe more powerful than grammarly, but I think it’s generally still fairly low level in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy. Authorship is supposed to be for intellectual contribution. If LLMs get good enough to start identifying weaknesses in my methods section or suggesting novel analyses to answer scientific questions, then maybe I’ll reconsider my view Though there’s still the argument made in this article that authors should be able to take responsibility for the work, which under our current legal framework programs can’t do
- carbocation 4y ago
  You are in good company: > “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.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    I don't understand why llms need to be acknowledged if writing assistants aren't.
- thastings 4y ago
  Exactly, came here to write this. Disclosing the contribution of ChatGPT is quite important though from a transparency standpoint. I wouldn't mind seeing it in the methods section either.
- snthpy 4y ago
  Or Google? Google probably also replaced the work of many a research assistant. It's interesting that ChatGPT feels more human so we're more likely to anthropomorphise it, like list it as a coauthor.
andrewstuart 4y ago
That's like listing Microsoft Word as an author. Its worth noting that global patent offices have rejected AI listed as the inventor on patents - this has gone through trial and appeal an been heard by a panel of five judges at the highest level, who struck down the idea. Patents require a human inventor. https://www.nexttv.com/news/court-ai-systems-cant-create-patentable-inventions https://www.nexttv.com/news/court-ai-systems-cant-create-pat...
- EGreg 4y ago
  Replace the judges with AI and see what it says. Just wait until the AI takes over the courts LOL
  - qvrjuec 4y ago
    Fortunately the AI will have been trained on human legal opinion and will rule the same way
- narrator 4y ago
  That's because if you said AI invented something and there was fraud or it was stolen from someone else the people who were making money off the patent would just say "Oops! nobody should get fined or go to prison because the computer did it all by itself." Imagine if Elizabeth Holmes said the AI told her the Theranos machine worked. It lied, so you have to put the AI in prison now.
  - thereisnospork 4y ago
    This is going to get really interesting really soon I think, whether an 'AI' can be capable of inventive "thought": Could, for instance, one teach an AI to come up with the concept of a screw[0] from training it on inclined planes and nails? Or at least, everything but screws/bolts, and any other form of rotary inclined plane. If AI can come up with a former novelty, there is no reason AI couldn't come up with a new one. [0]Undeniably an invention, if trivial now.
- hollasch 4y ago
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Cameras have billions of dollars of R&D behind them that manifest in their capabilities. A photographer sets the scene and pushes the button. This is the same with ChatGPT.
- GalenErso 4y ago
  If I could ask a camera to grow legs, or wings, go to Nepal and take a picture of a forest, from America, I would agree.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    DJI built that, add another $100,000,000 in supply chain R&D.
  - tjr225 4y ago
    AI can’t do that either.
    - owlninja 4y ago
      It will certainly try though, and probably give an excellent output. But people that haven't been there will have no idea.
  - fnordpiglet 4y ago
    Sort of like some sort of flying robot you can control remotely and take pictures with while hovering? If only such a thing existed.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      You don't even have to control some of them remotely. They will follow you automatically. You still wouldn't say that DJI was the cinematographer.
  - dchftcs 4y ago
    Alas one of the most lucrative fields is wedding shoots.
xyzabc098123 4y ago
Everyone wants to appear fair and pragmatic. Instead of coming up with 'scholarly' justifications for why AI can't be authors, why can't they simply update the policy to say that 'to be author, you must be eligible for human rights' or something along the line?
- spiderice 4y ago
  > must be eligible for human rights Why complicate things? Why not just "be a human"?
  - xyzabc098123 4y ago
    Exactly. But I don't wish to explain what it meant by being a human.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bordercases 4y ago
    Not operationalized
chazeon 4y ago
I believe using large language models to generate paper will be the trend eventually. Being an English as a second language speaker, writing these papers cost too much time. If I am a native speaker, my output could be at least 2-4x. These AI models give me a lot of hope. Now there are just so many results sitting there in the hard drives collecting dust, but I don't have the time/energy to write a paper for them. This AI authorship issue needs to get resolved one day.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I believe the word should be format and not generate. The model is just formatting your content to fit the proper English "template". It's not generating its own content in this case
  - chazeon 4y ago
    Mostly true. From what i observe the processes could will be like give hint to AI to create a bunch of template of some sort, then humans select / rearrange / put in number and detail then AI fix grammar.
p-e-w 4y ago
What we're witnessing here are the last gasps of the old world order. Powerful people are going to be tripping over each other in the next few years, lawyering and philosophizing around, trying to define "intelligence", "consciousness", "authorship" etc. to serve their interests, but it will all be for nothing. Very soon you'll be able to tell an AI to "write a vampire romance novel", "design an Earth observation satellite", or "compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven", and the result will be plainly superior to what any human engaging in the same pursuit could produce. At that point, the whole "sentience" debate will fall apart, along with much of society as even the smartest humans are made essentially obsolete.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > soon you'll be able to tell an AI to "write a vampire romance novel", "design an Earth observation satellite", or "compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven", and the result will be plainly superior to what any human engaging in the same pursuit could produce This overdramatises a simple, obvious amendment to copyright via case law. No debates around sentience. If a human didn’t create it, it isn’t IP.
  - cwkoss 4y ago
    IP isn't going to be important in the age of infinite content
  - p-e-w 4y ago
    You're thinking way too small. Nobody is going to care about copyright 15 years from now. "MovieGPT, make me an epic fantasy film trilogy that's better than Lord of the Rings, with myself as the hero." How could intellectual property possibly matter in a world like that? Nobody is going to still read books or watch films made by humans, because AI-generated stuff will be much better, much more plentiful, and even cater to individual desires.
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > nobody is going to care about copyright 15 years from now This is a perennial prediction. Absent substantiation, it’s hard to take it seriously. > "MovieGPT, make me an epic fantasy film trilogy that's better than Lord of the Rings, with myself as the hero." This output isn’t protected. The Lord of the Rings is. We shift to your AI paying when it references the content and move on. Nobody likes licensing fees. Magicking them away isn’t a solution.
Gatsky 4y ago
Obvious that these authors listed ChatGPT to get attention. The papers themselves are very short. The medxriv preprint [1] should be a blogpost. The paper in Oncoscience is nonsense [2]. It was submitted on Dec 14th and accepted on Dec 15th 2022, apparently contravening the journal’s stated peer review policy (find me an article anywhere that gets peer reviewed in under 24 hours). The journal presumably realised the clickbait value and rushed it through. Suffice to say, the authors’ cheap strategy has worked. The medrxiv preprint has an impressive view and retweet count. Expect a flood of ChatGPT authored papers. [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643v... [2] https://www.oncoscience.us/article/571/text/ https://www.oncoscience.us/article/571/text/
- izacus 4y ago
  And then the academia will wonder why general public stopped trusting science again.
  - heyitsguay 4y ago
    This is actually a case of credulous laypeople drawing attention to something academics know enough to dismiss (and to communicate to others that it is dismissal-worthy)
    - izacus 4y ago
      And yet it's been published in a journal with an expedited peer review to gather drama and clicks which undermines everything academics claim to stand for. What does that do to credibility of other papers?
    - ramblerman 4y ago
      That would be like suggesting hackernews works well, just don't check out the front page, you and your friends have a curated list of articles that are actually worthwhile reading.
- exabrial 4y ago
ghusto 4y ago
I wonder what happens when AI has written most of the types of content used for training it, and has then had that content feed back in. Will the quality devolve?

55 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

I think this is totally legitimate. ChatGPT represents an aggregate intelligence and the crowd that built it, willingly or not, deserve recognition, and condemnation all the more so, depending on what ChatGPT spits out.

rsfern 4y ago

If anything it should go in the acknowledgments section, not the author list. Would you list grammarly as a coauthor?

tick_tock_tick 4y ago
Grammarly doesn't write whole pages itself.
- rsfern 4y ago
  True, but I still think chatGPT is just a tool, maybe more powerful than grammarly, but I think it’s generally still fairly low level in terms of Bloom’s taxonomy. Authorship is supposed to be for intellectual contribution. If LLMs get good enough to start identifying weaknesses in my methods section or suggesting novel analyses to answer scientific questions, then maybe I’ll reconsider my view Though there’s still the argument made in this article that authors should be able to take responsibility for the work, which under our current legal framework programs can’t do
carbocation 4y ago
You are in good company: > “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.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  I don't understand why llms need to be acknowledged if writing assistants aren't.
thastings 4y ago
Exactly, came here to write this. Disclosing the contribution of ChatGPT is quite important though from a transparency standpoint. I wouldn't mind seeing it in the methods section either.
snthpy 4y ago
Or Google? Google probably also replaced the work of many a research assistant. It's interesting that ChatGPT feels more human so we're more likely to anthropomorphise it, like list it as a coauthor.

andrewstuart 4y ago

That's like listing Microsoft Word as an author. Its worth noting that global patent offices have rejected AI listed as the inventor on patents - this has gone through trial and appeal an been heard by a panel of five judges at the highest level, who struck down the idea. Patents require a human inventor. https://www.nexttv.com/news/court-ai-systems-cant-create-patentable-inventions https://www.nexttv.com/news/court-ai-systems-cant-create-pat...

EGreg 4y ago
Replace the judges with AI and see what it says. Just wait until the AI takes over the courts LOL
- qvrjuec 4y ago
  Fortunately the AI will have been trained on human legal opinion and will rule the same way
narrator 4y ago
That's because if you said AI invented something and there was fraud or it was stolen from someone else the people who were making money off the patent would just say "Oops! nobody should get fined or go to prison because the computer did it all by itself." Imagine if Elizabeth Holmes said the AI told her the Theranos machine worked. It lied, so you have to put the AI in prison now.
- thereisnospork 4y ago
  This is going to get really interesting really soon I think, whether an 'AI' can be capable of inventive "thought": Could, for instance, one teach an AI to come up with the concept of a screw[0] from training it on inclined planes and nails? Or at least, everything but screws/bolts, and any other form of rotary inclined plane. If AI can come up with a former novelty, there is no reason AI couldn't come up with a new one. [0]Undeniably an invention, if trivial now.
hollasch 4y ago

mensetmanusman 4y ago

Cameras have billions of dollars of R&D behind them that manifest in their capabilities. A photographer sets the scene and pushes the button. This is the same with ChatGPT.

GalenErso 4y ago
If I could ask a camera to grow legs, or wings, go to Nepal and take a picture of a forest, from America, I would agree.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  DJI built that, add another $100,000,000 in supply chain R&D.
- tjr225 4y ago
  AI can’t do that either.
  - owlninja 4y ago
    It will certainly try though, and probably give an excellent output. But people that haven't been there will have no idea.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
  Sort of like some sort of flying robot you can control remotely and take pictures with while hovering? If only such a thing existed.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    You don't even have to control some of them remotely. They will follow you automatically. You still wouldn't say that DJI was the cinematographer.
- dchftcs 4y ago
  Alas one of the most lucrative fields is wedding shoots.

xyzabc098123 4y ago

Everyone wants to appear fair and pragmatic. Instead of coming up with 'scholarly' justifications for why AI can't be authors, why can't they simply update the policy to say that 'to be author, you must be eligible for human rights' or something along the line?

spiderice 4y ago
> must be eligible for human rights Why complicate things? Why not just "be a human"?
- xyzabc098123 4y ago
  Exactly. But I don't wish to explain what it meant by being a human.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bordercases 4y ago
  Not operationalized

chazeon 4y ago

I believe using large language models to generate paper will be the trend eventually. Being an English as a second language speaker, writing these papers cost too much time. If I am a native speaker, my output could be at least 2-4x. These AI models give me a lot of hope. Now there are just so many results sitting there in the hard drives collecting dust, but I don't have the time/energy to write a paper for them. This AI authorship issue needs to get resolved one day.

cuteboy19 4y ago
I believe the word should be format and not generate. The model is just formatting your content to fit the proper English "template". It's not generating its own content in this case
- chazeon 4y ago
  Mostly true. From what i observe the processes could will be like give hint to AI to create a bunch of template of some sort, then humans select / rearrange / put in number and detail then AI fix grammar.

p-e-w 4y ago

What we're witnessing here are the last gasps of the old world order. Powerful people are going to be tripping over each other in the next few years, lawyering and philosophizing around, trying to define "intelligence", "consciousness", "authorship" etc. to serve their interests, but it will all be for nothing. Very soon you'll be able to tell an AI to "write a vampire romance novel", "design an Earth observation satellite", or "compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven", and the result will be plainly superior to what any human engaging in the same pursuit could produce. At that point, the whole "sentience" debate will fall apart, along with much of society as even the smartest humans are made essentially obsolete.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> soon you'll be able to tell an AI to "write a vampire romance novel", "design an Earth observation satellite", or "compose a symphony in the style of Beethoven", and the result will be plainly superior to what any human engaging in the same pursuit could produce This overdramatises a simple, obvious amendment to copyright via case law. No debates around sentience. If a human didn’t create it, it isn’t IP.
- cwkoss 4y ago
  IP isn't going to be important in the age of infinite content
- p-e-w 4y ago
  You're thinking way too small. Nobody is going to care about copyright 15 years from now. "MovieGPT, make me an epic fantasy film trilogy that's better than Lord of the Rings, with myself as the hero." How could intellectual property possibly matter in a world like that? Nobody is going to still read books or watch films made by humans, because AI-generated stuff will be much better, much more plentiful, and even cater to individual desires.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > nobody is going to care about copyright 15 years from now This is a perennial prediction. Absent substantiation, it’s hard to take it seriously. > "MovieGPT, make me an epic fantasy film trilogy that's better than Lord of the Rings, with myself as the hero." This output isn’t protected. The Lord of the Rings is. We shift to your AI paying when it references the content and move on. Nobody likes licensing fees. Magicking them away isn’t a solution.

Gatsky 4y ago

Obvious that these authors listed ChatGPT to get attention. The papers themselves are very short. The medxriv preprint [1] should be a blogpost. The paper in Oncoscience is nonsense [2]. It was submitted on Dec 14th and accepted on Dec 15th 2022, apparently contravening the journal’s stated peer review policy (find me an article anywhere that gets peer reviewed in under 24 hours). The journal presumably realised the clickbait value and rushed it through. Suffice to say, the authors’ cheap strategy has worked. The medrxiv preprint has an impressive view and retweet count. Expect a flood of ChatGPT authored papers. [1] https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643v2 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.12.19.22283643v... [2] https://www.oncoscience.us/article/571/text/ https://www.oncoscience.us/article/571/text/

izacus 4y ago
And then the academia will wonder why general public stopped trusting science again.
- heyitsguay 4y ago
  This is actually a case of credulous laypeople drawing attention to something academics know enough to dismiss (and to communicate to others that it is dismissal-worthy)
  - izacus 4y ago
    And yet it's been published in a journal with an expedited peer review to gather drama and clicks which undermines everything academics claim to stand for. What does that do to credibility of other papers?
  - ramblerman 4y ago
    That would be like suggesting hackernews works well, just don't check out the front page, you and your friends have a curated list of articles that are actually worthwhile reading.
exabrial 4y ago

ghusto 4y ago

I wonder what happens when AI has written most of the types of content used for training it, and has then had that content feed back in. Will the quality devolve?