Human‐ and AI‐based authorship: Principles and ethics

Abstract

Key points The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommendations for authorship are the dominant guidelines that guide who, and under what circumstances, an individual can be an author of an academic paper. Large language models (LLMs) and AI, like ChatGPT, given their ability and versatility, pose a challenge to the human‐based authorship model. Several journals and publishers have already prohibited the assignment of authorship to AI, LLMs, and even ChatGPT, not recognizing them as valid authors. We debate this premise, and asked ChatGPT to opine on this issue. ChatGPT considers itself as an invalid author. We applied the CRediT criteria to AI, finding that it was definitively able to satisfy three out of the 14 criteria, but only in terms of assistance. This was validated by ChatGPT itself.