Can an artificial intelligence chatbot be the author of a scholarly article?

Abstract

At the end of 2022, the appearance of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot with amazing writing ability, caused a great sensation in academia. The chatbot turned out to be very capable, but also capable of deception, and the news broke that several researchers had listed the chatbot (including its earlier version) as co-authors of their academic papers. In response, Nature and Science expressed their position that this chatbot cannot be listed as an author in the papers they publish. Since an AI chatbot is not a human being, in the current legal system, the text automatically generated by an AI chatbot cannot be a copyrighted work; thus, an AI chatbot cannot be an author of a copyrighted work. Current AI chatbots such as ChatGPT are much more advanced than search engines in that they produce original text, but they still remain at the level of a search engine in that they cannot take responsibility for their writing. For this reason, they also cannot be authors from the perspective of research ethics.

ChatGPT in Healthcare: A Taxonomy and Systematic Review

“…By March 20, 2023, a total of 140 publications are retrieved in PubMed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) using the keyword ChatGPT. Among them, article written in languages other than English (e.g., French [84]), without full text access (e.g., [62]), or whose main content has little to do with (or is not specific to) either ChatGPT (e.g., [46, 104, 33, 37]) or healthcare (e.g., [97, 103, 27, 6, 39, 13, 88, 21, 66, 115, 102, 43]) are excluded. Other representative exclusions include [44, 55], which deal with CPT-3, and [56, 30, 90, 2], where the authors claimed that ChatGPT assisted with the writing of the papers or case reports, but did not provide any discussion of the appropriateness of the generated texts and how the texts were incorporated into the main content.…”

“…Main argument for the decision is that ChatGPT cannot properly source literature where its answers are derived from, causing unintentional plagiarism, nor can it take accountability as human authors do [105, 27]. The decision is echoed by the academic community [58, 97, 115, 66], agreeing that ChatGPT-generated content must be scrutinized by human experts before being used [58], as the generated content, such as references [105, 12, 40, 31] could be fabricated. Lee, J.Y.…”

“…Lee, J.Y. et al [66] reiterated from a legal (e.g., copy-right law) perspective the inappropriateness of listing ChatGPT as an author, emphasizing that a non-human cannot take legal responsibilities and consequences. However, banning ChatGPT from scientific writing is not easily enforceable, since ChatGPT is trained to produce human-like texts that even scientists and specifically-trained AI detector sometimes fail to detect [29, 7].…”

“…The following of the review will show that existing publications on ChatGPT in healthcare can all find a proper categorization based on the proposed taxonomy. [40], [28], [76], [48], [24], [86] consultation [42], [66], [20], [41] clinical workflow [69], [68], [4], [ Besides the taxonomy, we further assign a tag (Level 1 -Level 3 ) to the selected papers to indicate the depth and particularity of the papers on the 'ChatGPT in Healthcare' topic:…”

Emergence of the metaverse and ChatGPT in journal publishing after the COVID-19 pandemic

“…There is a debate on ChatGPT's authorship eligibility. I currently do not consider ChatGPT eligible to be an author, primarily because "an AI chatbot cannot be an author of a copyrighted work, and the text automatically generated by an AI chatbot cannot be a copyrighted work" [9].…”