27 Recent Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Where Does Publishing’s A.I. Problem Leave Authors and Readers? – New York Times

Dozens of AI disease-prediction models were trained on dubious data – Nature   

Frontiers issues AI guidance spanning full publishing lifecycle – Research Information  

Tackle ‘AI slop’ in education research ‘or lose teacher trust’ – Times Higher Ed

Plagiarised research passed automated tests, and I detected it – but only because it copied my work – Conversation

If a Large Language Model can replicate your scientific contribution, the problem is not the LLM – Nature

Bloodhound code sniffs out copied-and-pasted numerical data – Retraction Watch

Scientists Invented a Fake Disease Caused by Blue Light—Now It's in Medical Papers  - Inc

AI Is a Better Researcher Than You That claim got a political scientist denounced. Is it true? – Chronicle of Higher Ed  

Cite unseen: when AI hallucinates scientific articles- Science.org

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? - Nature 

Anonymisation in research must be overhauled for AI era – Research Professional News

What is p hacking, is it bad, and can you get AI to do it for you? – Towards Data Science

Policies Permitting LLM Use for Polishing Peer Reviews Are Currently Not Enforceable – ArXiv

A citation alert led researchers to a network of fake articles. But who is benefiting? – Retraction Watch  

More AI will not beat the Red Queen - Wonkhe

STM Plants a Flag About Responsible Use of Research Content in GenAI – Scholarly Kitchen   

Prompt injection in manuscripts: exploiting loopholes or crossing ethical lines? – Springer  

Seeing Is Believing? Scientific Misconduct and the Detection of Problematic Images – International Anesthesia Research Society

How to build an AI scientist: first peer-reviewed paper spills the secrets - Nature  

Major conference catches illicit AI use — and rejects hundreds of papers - Nature

An AI-authored paper just passed peer review. The scientific community isn’t ready – Scientific American  

Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content – 404 Media

The European Research Council sets out firm line on use of AI in peer review – Research Professional News  

AI models fail to accurately pick out which social science studies could be replicated - OSF

Generative AI in academic writing: a comparison of human-authored and ChatGPT-generated research article titles - Nature

Restoring Trust in Science: Storytelling, AI, and Integrity in Scholarly Publishing – ISMPP (webinar recording)

AI takes the creativity out of cheating

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.  But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had done the writing. -More in the New York Times

17 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

Chief AI Officer: Higher Ed’s New Leadership Role - GovTech

Crafting Thoughtful AI Policy in Higher Education: A Guide for Institutional Leaders – Faculty Focus

The Computer-Science Bubble Is Bursting: Artificial intelligence is ideally suited to replacing the very type of person who built it – The Atlantic 

How Higher Ed Institutions Are Using Built-In Generative AI Tools – EdTech Magazine

AI Agents Are Set To Transform Higher Education—Here’s How – Forbes

Welcome to Campus. Here’s Your ChatGPT. – New York Times

OpenAI, the firm that helped spark chatbot cheating, wants to embed A.I. in every facet of college. First up: 460,000 students at Cal State. - New York Times

What I Learned Serving on My University’s AI Committee – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI and Threats to Academic Integrity: What to Do – Inside Higher Ed

How Miami Schools Are Leading 100,000 Students Into the A.I. Future - New York Times

In Battle Against AI-Powered Fraudsters, Colleges Turn to New Weapon – AI – Voice of San Diego

Boston University Denies It Would Use AI to Replace Striking Teaching Assistants – Inside Higher Ed  

Are You Ready for the AI University? – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

Students Found Out AI Will Help Read Their Names at Commencement. Protest Ensued. – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

How To Stay Ahead Of AI – The Human Skills Universities Must Teach - Forbes 

To ‘publish or perish’, do we need to add ‘AI or die’? – Times Higher Ed

As ‘Bot’ Students Continue to Flood In, Community Colleges Struggle to Respond – Voice of San Diego

Academic Leaders Disagree on Students using AI

“What constitutes legitimate use of AI and what is out of bounds? Academic leaders don’t always agree whether hypothetical scenarios described appropriate uses of AI or not: For one example—in which a student used AI to generate a detailed outline for a paper and then used the outline to write the paper—the verdict (in a recent survey) was completely split.” -Inside Higher Ed

17 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Can generative AI replace humans in qualitative research studies? - Techxplore

The recent reduction in spelling error rates in academic papers could be due to an increased use of LLMs – OSF Preprints  

AI linked to explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers - Nature 

Flood of AI-assisted research ‘weakening quality of science'” – Times Higher Ed

Shoddy study designs and false findings using a large public health dataset portend future risk of exploitation by AI and paper mills – PLOS Biology

Is it OK for AI to write science papers? Nature survey shows researchers are split - Nature

MIT Says It No Longer Stands Behind Student’s AI Research Paper – Wall Street Journal  

Meta releases new data set, AI model aimed at speeding up scientific research – Semafor

Experiment using AI-generated posts on Reddit draws fire for ethics concerns – Retraction Watch

AI-Reddit study leader gets warning as ethics committee moves to ‘stricter review process’ – Retraction Watch  

Why misuse of generative AI is worse than plagiarism – Springer

Science sleuths flag hundreds of papers that use AI without disclosing it - Nature

Google engineer withdraws preprint after getting called out for using AI – Retraction Watch

Scientific Data Fabrication and AI—Pandora’s Box – JAMA Network

AI summary ‘trashed author’s work’ and took weeks to be corrected – Times Higher Ed

AI language models increasingly shape economics research writing, study finds – Phys.org

Artificial intelligence in vaccine research and development: an umbrella review – Frontiers

Straight A’s won’t matter in real life

When I was in college, I obsessed over getting straight A’s, said Adam Grant. Now that I’m a professor, “I watch in dismay” when I see students joining the same “cult of perfectionism.” They think straight A’s will provide entrée to elite graduate schools and prestigious careers. The evidence, however, says otherwise. Research across industries shows that while there’s a modest correlation between grades and job performance the first year out of college, after a few years, the difference is “trivial.” Why? “Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality.” While straight-A students are locked in their dorm rooms or library pursuing “meaningless perfection,” their peers are developing skills that aren’t captured by grades: “creativity, leadership, and teamwork skills and social, emotional, and political intelligence.” Real career success doesn’t come from “finding the right solution to a problem—it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.” In high school Steve Jobs pulled a 2.65 GPA, J.K. Rowling had a C average at Exeter, and Martin Luther King Jr. managed only one A in four years at Morehouse College. This tells us that “underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life.”

Adam Grant writing in The New York Times (as quoted in The Week Magazine

23 Articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

AI bots are overwhelming some journals – C&EN 

AI research summaries ‘exaggerate findings’, study warns – Times Higher Ed

Ethics in Academic Research: Who Is Responsible for Unethical Practices—AI, Scholars, Editors, or Institutions? – PrePrints

A Scanning Error Created a Fake Science Term—Now AI Won’t Let It Die - Gizmodo

GenAI Footprint in Scholarly Publications Reflects Complex Issues of Ac. Integrity Post-Plagiarism (video) - PUPP 

AI is transforming peer review — and many scientists are worried – Nature

A Shortcut or a Level Up? Harvard Faculty Debate Generative AI in Academia – The Crimson

Publishers Embrace AI as Research Integrity Tool – Inside Higher Ed 

AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement – Nature

AI search summaries cannibalise academic publishers’ web traffic – Times Higher Ed

An academic paper written by AI passed peer review — but it’s a bit more nuanced than that – Tech Crunch

Trying to Write an Academic Paper with LLM Assistance – Scholarly Kitchen  

Academic publishers warn against AI copyright plans - Research Professional News – Research Professional News  

AI detectors are poor western blot classifiers: a study of accuracy and predictive values – PeerJ  

Will AI jeopardize science photography? – Nature

Can AI Solve the Peer Review Crisis? - IZA Institute of Labor Economics 

Publishers need to provide guidelines on use of AI in research, says Wiley – Chemistry World  

ChatGPT to help peer review scientific studies in UK Government trial – Telegraph

Generative artificial intelligence usage guidelines for scholarly publishing: a cross-sectional study of medical journals – BMC Medicine  

Retractions Increase 10-Fold in 20 Years - and Now AI is Involved – AAPS News

A viral video reveals how an AI-generated mistake led to nearly two dozen flawed research papers – Economic  Times  

Is AI the new research scientist? Not so, according to a human-led study. – University of Florida  

The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Academic Writing and Publishing Papers – Research Gate

15 Articles about AI’s impact on College Faculty & Administrators

15 Articles about How Students are Using AI

Plagiarism & False Data in Academic Papers

There are countless credible accusations of (academic) misconduct that go uncorrected; I myself have published articles challenging the integrity of hundreds of papers. The majority of them have not been retracted, corrected or even remarked upon. I would wager that most reasonably large universities (my own included) have faculty members who are known to have plagiarized, fabricated, falsified, claimed undue credit, hidden financial conflicts of interest or misbehaved in numerous other ways and who have seemingly gone unpunished."

New York University professor Charles Seife writing in the New York Times

12 Articles on Cheating with AI & AI Detectors

The Trouble With AI Writing Detection – Inside Higher Ed

College application season is here. So is the struggle to find out if AI wrote students’ essays – Cal Matters 

If using ChatGPT to write essays becomes widespread, those students who elect not to use it, who prefer to do the work themselves, may suffer a penalty for doing so. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Results of a new survey flip the early narrative on ChatGPT—that students would rush to use it to cheat on assignments and that teachers would scramble to keep up—on its head. Half of students, ages 12-18, said they have never used ChatGPT. – Ed Week

OpenAI debates when to release its AI-generated image detector – Tech Crunch

Universities Rethink Using AI Writing Detectors to Vet Students’ Work – Bloomberg 

Identifying AI’s flaws motivates students and helps them build confidence, which can discourage cheating. Pointing out where it still really messes up is very powerful for empowering students to see their own strengths as human thinkers. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

Students cheat out of desperation so one professor will give multi-level assignments that force students to submit papers at various stages to keep track of their progress. – Yahoo News

The AI Detection Arms Race Is On And college students are developing the weapons, quickly building tools that identify AI-generated text—and tools to evade detection. – Wired

Simply leaving it up to students to decide whether they’re going to do the work, without further comment or intervention or negative sanction from me, is a failure of pedagogy. – Chronicle of Higher Ed

AI detectors have low efficiency, and simple modifications can allow even the most robust detectors to be easily bypassed. – Science Direct 

Suspicion, Cheating & Bans: AN Hits America's Schools (podcast) – New York Times

Should Students Choose Higher-Paying Majors?

Pushing students from science into the humanities tended to decrease their later-life wages — that’s finding is not surprising. But the converse also appeared to be true: Pushing students from the humanities into science also tended to, if anything, decrease their wages. While there are certain very high-paying majors (like engineering, economics, and computer science) that increase students’ earning potential even if they would prefer to study something else, helping students to study their most-preferred major generally seems to provide long-run financial benefits even in the humanities.

Students should know that when it comes to choosing a college degree, small differences in average-wage-by-major statistics shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Especially when the average wage differences between majors are not very big, students should put their own strengths first and not let the statistics cloud their understanding of their own interests.

Zachary Bleemer writing in the The Chronicle of Higher Ed

17 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship

Scientific authorship in the time of ChatGPT - Chemistry

AI could rescue scientific papers from the curse of jargon – Free Think

Science journals ban listing of ChatGPT as co-author on papers – The Guardian

ChatGPT listed as author on research papers: many scientists disapprove – Nature (subscription req)

Abstracts written by ChatGPT fool scientists – Nature (subscription req)

The World Association of Medical Editors has created guidelines for the use of ChatGPT and other chatbots - Medscape (sub req)  

ChatGPT: our study shows AI can produce academic papers good enough for journals – just as some ban it – The Conversation

It’s Not Just Our Students — ChatGPT Is Coming for Faculty Writing – Chronicle of Higher Ed 

As scientists explore AI-written text, journals hammer out policies – Science

AI writing tools could hand scientists the ‘gift of time’ – Nature

ChatGPT Is Everywhere Love it or hate it, academics can’t ignore the already pervasive technology– Chronicle of Higher Ed

Academic Publishers Are Missing the Point on ChatGPT – Scholarly Kitchen

AI Is Impacting Education, but the Best Is Yet to Come – Inside Higher Ed 

AI makes plagiarism harder to detect, argue academics – in paper written by chatbot – The Guardian

How to Cite ChatGPT – APA Style

Researchers claim to have developed tool capable of detecting scientific text generated by ChatGPT with 99% accuracy – University of Kansas

ChatGPT: five priorities for research – The Journal Nature

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments                                                               

27 thoughts on teaching with AI            

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection        

14 quotes worth reading about AI use in academic papers                       

13 Quotes worth reading about AI’s impact on College Administrators & Faculty

17 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship            

14 quotes worth reading about AI use in academic papers

ScienceElsevier and Nature were quick to react, updating their respective editorial and publishing policies, stating unconditionally that ChatGPT can’t be listed as an author on an academic paper. It is very hard to define exactly how GPT is used in a particular study as some publishers demand, the same way it is near impossible for authors to detail how they used Google as part of their research. Scholarly Kitchen

An app I have found useful every day is Perplexity. I am most taken with the auto-embedded citations of sources in the response, much like we do in research papers. This is most useful for deeper digging into topics. Inside Higher Ed 

Tools such as Grammarly, Writeful, and even Microsoft grammar checker are relied upon heavily by authors. If an author is using GPT for language purposes, why would that need to be declared and other tools not? What if authors get their ideas for new research from ChatGPT or have GPT analyze their results but write it up in their own words; might that be ok because the author is technically doing the writing? I believe that self-respecting researchers won’t use GPT as a primary source the same way they don’t use Wikipedia in that manner. However, they can use it in a myriad of other ways including brainstorming, sentence construction, data crunching, and more. The onus of responsibility for the veracity of information still falls on the researcher but that doesn’t mean we should run to ban because some might use it as a way to cut corners. Scholarly Kitchen

An academic paper entitled Chatting and Cheating: Ensuring Academic Integrity in the Era of ChatGPT was published this month in an education journal, describing how artificial intelligence (AI) tools “raise a number of challenges and concerns, particularly in relation to academic honesty and plagiarism”. What readers – and indeed the peer reviewers who cleared it for publication – did not know was that the paper itself had been written by the controversial AI chatbot ChatGPT. The Guardian

An application that holds great potential to those of us in higher ed is ChatPDF! It is what you might imagine, a tool that allows you to load a PDF of up to 120 pages in length. You can then apply the now-familiar ChatGPT analysis approach to the document itself. Ask for a summary. Dig into specifics. This will be a useful tool for reviewing research and efficiently understanding complex rulings and other legal documents. Inside Higher Ed

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, (for APA) describe (in your academic paper) how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response. You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper. APA Style 

Outside of the most empirical subjects, the determinants of academic status will be uniquely human — networking and sheer charisma — making it a great time to reread Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

The US journal Science, announced an updated editorial policy, banning the use of text from ChatGPT and clarifying that the program could not be listed as an author. Leading scientific journals require authors to sign a form declaring that they are accountable for their contribution to the work. Since ChatGPT cannot do this, it cannot be an author. The Guardian

A chatbot was deemed capable of generating quality academic research ideas. This raises fundamental questions around the meaning of creativity and ownership of creative ideas — questions to which nobody yet has solid answers. Our suspicion here is that ChatGPT is particularly strong at taking a set of external texts and connecting them (the essence of a research idea), or taking easily identifiable sections from one document and adjusting them (an example is the data summary — an easily identifiable “text chunk” in most research studies). A relative weakness of the platform became apparent when the task was more complex - when there are too many stages to the conceptual process. The Conversation 

Already some researchers are using the technology. Among only the small sample of my work colleagues, I’ve learned that it is being used for such daily tasks as: translating code from one programming language to another, potentially saving hours spent searching web forums for a solution; generating plain-language summaries of published research, or identifying key arguments on a particular topic; and creating bullet points to pull into a presentation or lecture. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

For most professors, writing — even bad first drafts or outlines — requires our labor (and sometimes strain) to develop an original thought. If the goal is to write a paper that introduces boundary-breaking new ideas, AI tools might reduce some of the intellectual effort needed to make that happen. Some will see that as a smart use of time, not evidence of intellectual laziness. Chronicle of Higher Ed

The quality of scientific research will erode if academic publishers can't find ways to detect fake AI-generated images in papers. In the best-case scenario, this form of academic fraud will be limited to just paper mill schemes that don't receive much attention anyway. In the worst-case scenario, it will impact even the most reputable journals and scientists with good intentions will waste time and money chasing false ideas they believe to be true. The Register 

Many journals’ new policies require that authors disclose use of text-generating tools and ban listing a large language model such as ChatGPT as a co-author, to underscore the human author’s responsibility for ensuring the text’s accuracy. That is the case for Nature and all Springer Nature journalsthe JAMA Network, and groups that advise on best practices in publishing, such as the Committee on Publication Ethics and the World Association of Medical Editors. Science

Just as publishers begin to get a grip on manual image manipulation, another threat is emerging. Some researchers may be tempted to use generative AI models to create brand-new fake data rather than altering existing photos and scans. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that sham scientists may be doing this already. A spokesperson for Uncle Sam's defense research agency confirmed it has spotted fake medical images in published science papers that appear to be generated using AI. The Register

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments                                                               

27 thoughts on teaching with AI            

22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection        

13 Quotes worth reading about AI’s impact on College Administrators & Faculty

17 articles about AI & Academic Scholarship                                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans

Eaton, the academic-integrity expert, cautions against trying to ban the use of ChatGPT entirely. That, she says, “is not only futile but probably ultimately irresponsible.” Chronicle of Higher Ed

I would compare this to using steroids in baseball. If you don’t ban steroids in baseball, then the reality is every player has to use them. Even worse than that, if you ban them but don’t enforce it, what you actually do is create a situation where you weed out all of the honest players. Chronicle of Higher Ed 

study surveyed 372 students seeking admission into college for fall 2023 and found that nearly half, 39% of those students, would not consider attending a college that's banned ChatGPT or other AI tools. ZDNET

Several leading academic journals and publishers updated their submission guidelines to explicitly ban researchers from listing ChatGPT as a co-author, or using text copied from a ChatGPT response. Some professors have criticized these bans as shortsightedly resistant to an inevitable technological change. Chronicle of Higher Ed

Blocking access to ChatGPT at school won’t matter, at least for any student with access to a tablet or laptop outside of school. Ed Week

ChatGPT and AI writer has been banned in educational institutions around the world, from high schools across America(opens in new tab) and Australia to universities in France and India with some university professors having caught their students using ChatGPT to write their entire assignments. Tech Radar 

A number of universities that say they are planning to expel students who are caught using the software. Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist and expert on contract cheating at Imperial College London, said many universities were “panicking”. The Guardian 

Los Angeles Unified, the second-­largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network. Others soon joined. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. MIT Tech Review

The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT in its schools, as has the University of Sciences Po, in Paris, citing concerns it may foster rampant plagiarism and undermine learning. Washington Post

Teachers at Oceana High School in Pacifica, California have sent out messages to students warning against using AI-writing software for assignments. Mashable

Washington University in St. Louis and University of Vermont in Burlington are among the institutions that have amended their academic integrity policies to include the usage of AI tools like ChatGPT. Stanford Daily 

Also:

21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection                        

13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans                   

20 quotes worth reading about students using AI                                    

27 quotes about AI & writing assignments            

22 examples of teaching with AI                                                           

27 thoughts on teaching with AI   

13 thoughts on the problems of teaching with AI                                  

Fake scientific papers are alarmingly common ­­­

When neuropsychologist Bernhard Sabel put his new fake-paper detector to work, he was “shocked” by what it found. After screening some 5000 papers, he estimates up to 34% of neuroscience papers published in 2020 were likely made up or plagiarized; in medicine, the figure was 24%.

Jeffrey Barinard writing in Science Magazine

Ditching Peer Review

If we let people say whatever they want, they will sometimes say untrue things, and that sounds scary. But we don’t actually prevent people from saying untrue things right now; we just pretend to. In fact, right now we occasionally bless untrue things with big stickers that say “INSPECTED BY A FANCY JOURNAL,” and those stickers are very hard to get off. That’s way scarier.

Adam Mastroianni writing in Experimental History

Resisting Simple Solutions

People who have always operated without skin in the game (or without their skin in the right game) seek the complicated, centralized, and avoid the simple like the pest. Practitioners on the other hand have opposite instincts, looking for the simplest heuristics.

People who are bred, selected, and compensated to find complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game