Perceptions and detection of AI use in manuscript preparation for academic journals

Abstract

The rapid advances in Generative AI tools have produced both excitement and worry about how AI will impact academic writing. However, little is known about what norms are emerging around AI use in manuscript preparation or how these norms might be enforced. We address both gaps in the literature by conducting a survey of 271 academics about whether it is necessary to report ChatGPT use in manuscript preparation and by running GPT-modified abstracts from 2,716 published papers through a leading AI detection software to see if these detectors can detect different AI uses in manuscript preparation. We find that most academics do not think that using ChatGPT to fix grammar needs to be reported, but detection software did not always draw this distinction, as abstracts for which GPT was used to fix grammar were often flagged as having a high chance of being written by AI. We also find disagreements among academics on whether more substantial use of ChatGPT to rewrite text needs to be reported, and these differences were related to perceptions of ethics, academic role, and English language background. Finally, we found little difference in their perceptions about reporting ChatGPT and research assistant help, but significant differences in reporting perceptions between these sources of assistance and paid proofreading and other AI assistant tools (Grammarly and Word). Our results suggest that there might be challenges in getting authors to report AI use in manuscript preparation because (i) there is not uniform agreement about what uses of AI should be reported and (ii) journals might have trouble enforcing nuanced reporting requirements using AI detection tools.