Academic Integrity Is Coming Increasingly Under Attack From Academics Using AI Tools as a Short‐Cut to Publications

We are publishing in this journal an illuminating article by Ognjen Arandelovic of the University of St Andrews in Scotland 1. Arandelovic deserves credit for painstakingly dismantling a peer reviewed article published by our colleagues at the Journal of medical ethics. What I am going to write next gives me no pleasure, both because the past and current editors of the journal are dear, and respected, colleagues, and also because it is just a matter of time until we, as editors of this journal, will make an editorial judgment error that is the result of having to deal with the deluge of AI supported or fully AI generated papers submitted these days to the journal. At the time of writing I serve pro bono as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of medical ethics. I have published in the past in the journal, and hope to do so again in the future. However, in this instance, the peer review process at the Journal of medical ethics seems to have broken down. The article criticised by Arandelovic was ostensibly written by an author affiliated with the French anti-doping agency. The author is using a yahoo email account, and a search for the author's name on the agency's website, that I undertook, yielded nothing. That does not mean there is no bona fide affliation, but during review processes this should raise a red flag. The paper itself contains a quirkily presented argument, at least by the standards of mainstream analytical philosophy ethics papers, against doping in sports. There is nothing wrong with taking such a stance, except, if one holds such a view and is employed or otherwise associated with a national anti-doping agency, one should have declared a conflict of interest. That doesn't mean that the paper should not have been published, but the conflict of interest should have been explicitly flagged to readers of the article, especially given that many readers would not be able to make sense of the French language affiliation of the author of the article. That disclosure didn't happen, or, if it did happen, the Journal of medical ethics failed to report the conflict of interest declaration. One could argue that the author disclosing their affiliation with said agency implied a kind of conflict-of-interest statement, but that's not sufficient. The British Medical Journal publishing group has a clear (and sound) guideline about such disclosures 2, and the author didn't follow that guideline, or the journal erroneously omitted to disclose the conflict-of-interest declaration made by the author. At this journal we recently received a double-digit number of submissions from authors in the Far East, using similar email addresses to the French author, where we had strong evidence of machine generated content. Nothing made much sense in these papers, the authors, with their yahoo and aol type email addresses, frequently supplied false university affiliations, among other glaring problems. I suspected that these submissions were a test of our detection systems more so than anything else. Given the number of made-up references in the Journal of medical ethics paper, it is reasonable to assume that these references were the result of an AI hallucinating, a known phenomenon of AI-written content that adds non-existent references to the content the AI generated, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that the author of this manuscript was careless enough to leave a plethora of fake references in the manuscript. This doesn't happen by accident. During the proof corrections stage of the article the author would have had ample time to correct any errors but chose not to. Your guess about how much else of the manuscript was generated using AI is as good as mine. We don't currently have detection tools available to assist us in making reliable determinations 3. AI use also wasn't disclosed by this author, if this is what is (very likely) at the heart of the fake references. I'm pleased to say that, apparently unlike the BMJ group of journals, Wiley, the publisher of this journal, has in place a highly sophisticated automated reference check that is available to the editorial team. This manuscript would not have gone out for peer review if it had been submitted to Bioethics, because it would have been eliminated after the reference (and possibly the AI generated content) screening. Surprisingly, the BMJ group of journals doesn't seem to possess this sort of capacity, or it hasn't been deployed in this instance. I don't know how the reader views the fact that the reviewers and editors of the Journal of medical ethics didn't undertake a reference check for this manuscript given some of the already mentioned other ‘red flags’ that were in place. Arandelovic thinks that they failed the readers of the journal, and ultimately that the journal failed as an institution on this occasion. It is easy to point fingers here, but truth be told, it has become exceedingly difficult to find willing reviewers for the ever-increasing number of papers that are prima facie worthy of peer review, and those reviewers are still expected to work pro bono, because publishers don't wish to pay for their services 4. I am not surprised that reviewers do not spend their volunteer time undertaking detailed (or any) reference checks, especially given that the publisher could have systems in place that undertake that sort of task automatically. I have views about the troublingly weak substance of the paper itself and broadly agree with the content of Arandelovic's analysis. I am hopeful, given the integrity issues with this article, that it will be swiftly retracted. It is reasonable to ask why we published this article instead of notifying the editorial team at the Journal of medical ethics about the problems with the article they chose to publish. Academic freedom entails that academic researchers are well within their rights to submit their content for review wherever they see fit. As Editors of Bioethics, we have fiduciary obligations toward authors submitting their content to us. These obligations trump those I might have as a member of the editorial board of the Journal of medical ethics. The response paper we are publishing engages the substance of the Journal of medical ethics article, and it offers valuable insights on publishing ethics and publishing integrity. It is right for Bioethics to publish this paper. Let me end by quoting, approvingly, a member of our Editorial Board (and reviewer of this paper): “If we published something like this in Bioethics the Journal of medical ethics would have every right—and it would be in the interest of the field—to publish just such a rejoinder in their journal.” After consultation with Dr Arandelovic, and his consent, we informed one of the Editors of the Journal of medical ethics of the issues with the article they published. As far as Conflicts of Interest go, I should declare two: I am an Editor of Bioethics, and we are, in some sense, a competitor journal of the Journal of medical ethics. I am also a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of medical ethics.