ChatGPT is fun, but not an author

By H. Thorp. Science, 2023

1,223 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In less than 2 months, the artificial intelligence (AI) program ChatGPT has become a cultural sensation. It is freely accessible through a web portal created by the tool’s developer, OpenAI. The program—which automatically creates text based on written prompts—is so popular that it’s likely to be “at capacity right now” if you attempt to use it. When you do get through, ChatGPT provides endless entertainment. I asked it to rewrite the first scene of the classic American play Death of a Salesman, but to feature Princess Elsa from the animated movie Frozen as the main character instead of Willy Loman. The output was an amusing conversation in which Elsa—who has come home from a tough day of selling—is told by her son Happy, “Come on, Mom. You’re Elsa from Frozen. You have ice powers and you’re a queen. You’re unstoppable.” Mash-ups like this are certainly fun, but there are serious implications for generative AI programs like ChatGPT in science and academia.

Subfields: Health Informatics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/eddfb9be78cfe94193766e3722eb0e56c3d24cef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health Informatics

1. Jan Egger
2. Jianning Li
3. Amin Dada
4. Jens Kleesiek
5. Behrus Puladi
6. Emmanuel Sirimal Silva
7. Malik Sallam

Citations in the corpus

• Welcome to the Era of ChatGPT et al. (2023, background): “The Science journals take a strong stand and will consider any text ‘‘plagiarized from ChatGPT’’ as unacceptable (Thorp 2023).”
• Investigating the Impact of User Trust on the Adoption and Use of ChatGPT: Survey Analysis (2023, neutral): “Therefore, it is crucial to remain vigilant and proactively address the possible risks arising from its use [23].”
• ChatGPT Utility in Healthcare Education, Research, and Practice: Systematic Review on the Promising Perspectives and Valid Concerns (2023, methodology): “The disapproval of including ChatGPT or any other LLM in the list of authors was clearly explained in Science, Nature, and the Lancet editorials, which referred to such practice as scientific misconduct, and this view was echoed by many scientists [24,27,35,40,45].”
• From human writing to artificial intelligence generated text: examining the prospects and potential threats of ChatGPT in academic writing (2023, neutral): “While ChatGPT is capable of generating essays on various topics, its scholarly writing still needs improvement, as evidenced by its performance when given an exam and a final project from a science denial class at George Washington University [11].”
• The Role of ChatGPT in Data Science: How AI-Assisted Conversational Interfaces Are Revolutionizing the Field (2023, background): “As Thorp (2023) eloquently puts, ChatGPT has become a cultural sensation [7].”
• ChatGPT and large language models in academia: opportunities and challenges (2023, background): “Science has declared that no AI generated text or figures are allowed in their published papers, and ChatGPT cannot be named as an author in their journal [10].”
• ChatGPT and a new academic reality: Artificial Intelligence‐written research papers and the ethics of the large language models in scholarly publishing (2023, background): “For instance, editors from the renowned publication Science have prohibited the use of any text generated by ChatGPT or any other AI tools in papers published in the journal (Thorp, 2023).”
• ChatGPT in Healthcare: A Taxonomy and Systematic Review (2023, background): “Main argument for the decision is that ChatGPT cannot properly source literature where its answers are derived from, causing unintentional plagiarism, nor can it take accountability as human authors do [105, 27].”
• A Multitask, Multilingual, Multimodal Evaluation of ChatGPT on Reasoning, Hallucination, and Interactivity (2023, background): “…(Guo et al., 2023; Davis, 2023b); it hallu-cinates with human-like fluency and eloquence on things that are not based on truth (Shen et al., 2023; Thorp, 2023; Smith, 2023); and as a general-purpose language model trained from everything on the web, its language coverage is questionable (Lu et…”
• Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to real abstracts with detectors and blinded human reviewers (2023, neutral): “Different journals and publishers are developing their own policies on whether large language models can contribute to the writing of papers, ranging from not allowing any AI-generated text 12 to allowing its use as long as it is openly disclosed 13,14,28 .”
• GPT (Generative Pre-Trained Transformer)— A Comprehensive Review on Enabling Technologies, Potential Applications, Emerging Challenges, and Future Directions (2023, background): “GPTs entertain people in many ways, and of course, using GPT itself an entertainment as it reduces the burden of overthinking by providing immediate feedback to queries in seconds [144].”