Ever since its release last year, ChatGPT has been taking the internet by storm. Having recently passed all three parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam, according to findings published on medRxiv, it’s an artificial intelligence that has the scientific community talking.
“ChatGPT performed at or near the passing threshold for all three exams without any specialized training or reinforcement,” the non peer-reviewed study said. “Additionally, ChatGPT demonstrated a high level of concordance and insight in its explanations. These results suggest that large language models may have the potential to assist with medical education, and potentially, clinical decision-making.”
Now, as reported by The Guardian, science journals have begun updating their editorial policies to ban the A.I. from co-authoring any scientific content.
“Given the frenzy that has built up around this, it’s a good idea to make it absolutely explicit that we will not permit ChatGPT to be an author or to have its text used in papers,” Holden Thorp, editor-in-chief of “Science,” said.
Thorp also noted that the online service is already quite capable of finding its way into publications — at least theoretically.
“More worrisome are the effects of ChatGPT on writing scientific papers,” he reported. “In a recent study, abstracts created by ChatGPT were submitted to academic reviewers, who only caught 63% of these fakes. That’s a lot of AI-generated text that could find its way into the literature soon.
“For years, authors at the Science family of journals have signed a license certifying that ‘the Work is an original’ (italics added). For the Science journals, the word ‘original’ is enough to signal that text written by ChatGPT is not acceptable: It is, after all, plagiarized from ChatGPT.”
“The specific development that we felt very strongly that we needed to respond to was the fact that pretty much all of a sudden the tool was appearing as a co-author,” Magdalena Skipper, the editor-in-chief of Nature, added.
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