By Udo Schuklenk<\/p>\n
Brian Earp and colleagues invited commentaries on authorship and generative AI. They offer us some good reasons for why generative AI will be forcing us to disaggregate authorship, and also for the view that we may need different authorship criteria for different outputs. Perhaps they are right.<\/p>\n
My commentary goes in a somewhat tangential direction to their question, because I wondered what it all means for journal editors like myself. I have been an Editor of Bioethics<\/em> for a quarter of a century. Generative AI has brought to the fore a question journals were never quite pressed to address in the same way before: who, or what, wrote the manuscript in front of us? Academic journals are currently seeing exponential increases in article submissions not because our academic colleagues have suddenly become more productive writers, but because AI generated drafting has supercharged the production process. There are real-world authors who send us 2-3 article-length manuscripts per week, on a wide range of different topics. Some acknowledge the AI drafting, some don\u2019t, some acknowledge some of the drafting but probably not the full extent, etc etc.<\/p>\n The authorship anxiety seemingly driving Earp and colleagues is understandable. In a heavily AI-assisted workflow, it can appear to be the case that neither the human nor the machine satisfies traditional authorship criteria, leaving us with “authorless” essays that publishing is unprepared for. My view is that this is a pseudo-problem, and that the impulse to resolve it by policing how manuscripts come into being takes editors away from the one job we can actually do reasonably well.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s start by asking what a journal is for. I take it that its function is to certify, typically through peer review, that a manuscript makes a competent and original contribution. Reviewers assess whether the argument is sound and whether the evidence and engagement with the literature warrant the conclusions. We are not asked, and we certainly are in no position to answer, “who really wrote these sentences?” Double-anonymised review, at least, institutionalises precisely this indifference to provenance: we deliberately strip away information about authors because it is irrelevant to the merits of the work. Generative AI does not change what our job is. It simply confronts us with a contributor whose involvement we cannot verify reliably today (truth be told, we never could). To me this suggests that we should focus on what can be assessed, not to invent investigative duties no editor can discharge today reliably.<\/p>\n Suppose I wanted to police compositional provenance. How, today, would I do it? AI-detection tools are unreliable, easily defeated by light editing, and known to misclassify the prose of non-native English speakers as machine-generated. The AI detection emperor is truly naked. Publishers use the supposed need to train their AI-detection AI as a justification to feed all of our manuscript submissions into their AI for training purposes. The motivation is commercial, it is not one primarily concerned with academic integrity. In reality, self-reports cannot be verified. Why should journal editors commit to an arms race we cannot win? Why should we pretend that the naked emperor is wearing a designer suit?<\/p>\n What journals actually require is not a metaphysically certified author but a guarantor: an identifiable, sanctionable human who warrants that the claims are accurate and the cited sources genuine, and who accepts professional consequences if they are not. That requirement attaches to whatever is submitted, regardless of how it came about. Whoever has reviewed, fact-checked and approved a heavily AI-drafted manuscript can sign such a warrant; if it contains fabricated references or fraudulent claims, they are accountable. If they plagiarized prior content and happen to get caught, they will be held accountable. This is not a new idea! The JAMA\u2019s late Drummond Rennie and colleagues argued for accountable guarantors well before AI arrived.<\/p>\n Authorship will continue, in diminished form, bookkeepers in university hiring and promotion committees, and in funding agencies will see to it, and frankly, it\u2019s still nice to see one\u2019s name on an output one has produced. Let funders, hiring and promotion committees, and anyone else who cares, investigate who deserves the credit for a given contribution.<\/p>\n My take-away message is this: Accountability for content attaches to the act of submission, through a named guarantor, not to the act of composition.<\/p>\n As editors we have a more tractable task: judging the work. We should stick to that.<\/p>\n As the German saying goes: Schuster bleib bei Deinen Leisten (Cobbler, stick to your last).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n