Editorial: Generative artificial intelligence as a plagiarism problem

Abstract

There is increasing concern and consternation about generative artificial intelligence (AI) programs and its potential impact on academia. This editorial addresses the potential impact of such programs on scientific publishing as it relates to the journal Biological Psychology. Using chatGPT as an example, it makes the case that a prime concern is its implications for facilitating plagiarism. It briefly outlines what is known about the algorithm of the GPT text model, and also the implications of its chatGPT front end, on being able to establish appropriate credit for ideas in text that it outputs. It is concluded that, at least for Biological Psychology, the expectation is that authors will be transparent about AI usage, will declare when AI is the source of an idea, and will redouble efforts to seek out and cite prior claims to ideas in the published literature when AI is involved.

Keywords: Academic misconduct; Artificial intelligence; ChatGPT; Large language models; Plagiarism.