As Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as generative AI became more common, its use in academic settings also gained more popularity. Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer (ChatGPT) is an AI powered chatbot developed by OpenAI. It has many benefits for scholarly publishing. However, ChatGPT and related technologies have been identified as disruptive innovations with the potential to revolutionize academia and scholarly publishing (Haque et al., 2022). ChatGPT can only benefit authors when used responsibly. There are certainly ethical issues with using ChatGPT for scholarly publishing. First of all, authorship is a major concern. There are questions about the ownership of the work generated by ChatGPT (Schönberger, 2018). Besides, there may be concerns about copyright as well. When using ChatGPT, users may find it challenging to ensure that quotes, data, or other materials from external sources comply with copyright laws and receive proper attribution (Gillotte, 2019). When the language models are trained on a massive amount of data from unknown sources, it is almost impossible to track the original source. As a result, plagiarism may arise from using ChatGPT. It is not limited to copyrighted text, but also includes paraphrasing, methods, graphics, ideas, and any other product of intelligence that belongs to another person (Gasparyan et al., 2017). With the issues raised above, it is necessary to examine the current state of transparency regarding the use of generative AI in scholarly publishing.
Gao et al. (Thu,) studied this question.