After Experiment, Journal Decides to Prohibit AI

After Experiment, Journal Decides to Prohibit AI-Authored Content Earlier this month, the journal Philosophy & Public Affairs published an article largely written by an AI. The article was described as an experiment by the philosopher who submitted it, Simon Goldstein (Hong Kong), and its publication was similarly described by the journal’s editor in chief, Jason Brennan (Georgetown).Now that the experiment has been discussed a fair amount here and elsewhere online, the journal has decided from now on to prohibit AI-authored content. Seth Lazar (Johns Hopkins), an associate editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, shared the journal’s new policy on X.com: Academic journals serve at least two functions: the promulgation of new knowledge, and identification and credentialing of talented researchers. There are many other means available to share new knowledge, but few for credentialing talented researchers, where “talented” means roughly: able, on their own or together with other researchers, to make and communicate significant progress on fundamental problems. Submitting AI-authored essays makes the task of identifying talented researchers harder. In addition, while it is at this time possible for a researcher to use AI to author a paper that is itself high quality, it is disproportionately unlikely that they will do so, and much more likely that the paper will have all the surface appearances of sophisticated work, but ultimately be insubstantial or incoherent. This makes it harder to peer review, and makes the task of peer review in general more onerous, at a time when it is already under significant strain. Those who enjoy and value the products of AI writing have many other places where they can publish such work, notably online. There may also be a case for creating journals of AI-authored research. So there are very few benefits to publishing AI-authored work in existing academic journals, and, given the above, significant costs. Our policy is therefore to prohibit the submission of AI-authored content to Philosophy & Public Affairs. We define AI-authored content as papers that are substantially written by AI. We distinguish this from the use of AI for light copy-editing (which we in general define as reorganising or condensing written work without rephrasing). We also emphasise that authors are entitled (indeed encouraged) to use AI while conducting their research, in whatever ways they choose. To implement this policy, we require authors to declare that they have not used AI to author their paper, and to explicitly describe how they have used AI in the process of conducting the research that led to the paper. We will use the leading AI detection software at the time to verify the truthfulness of the former declaration. We note that AI detection software, including updated models, may be used throughout the review process, up to and including after publication. If at any point we discover that the author’s declaration that AI was not used to author the paper’s content was false, the paper will be rejected or retracted, and the author will be banned from further submission to Philosophy & Public Affairs. In a further comment, Lazar emphasized the “stick” part of the policy at the end: I think it’s particularly important that we can retract papers and punish authors even when the paper has been published (going forward). No doubt at some points the “humanizers” will be in the ascendancy. If an author profits from that to get one over on us, they can be sure that if the AI detection algorithms improve and they subsequently get caught, they won’t benefit from a statute of limitations. Discussion welcome.