AI Editing: Are We There Yet?

Recently emerged artificial intelligence (AI) tools, such as ChatGPT, have the potential to facilitate all aspects of academic research and publication. Over the past year, we have rigorously tested several generative AI models to explore how we can use the technology to refine our editing. This article presents a summary of our findings, identifying the strengths and weaknesses of AI tools for editing and highlighting some of the ongoing challenges we have encountered in incorporating these tools into our editing process. The insights provided by our testing should help both authors and editors make decisions about which editing tasks AI can be effectively used for and which tasks are best left for human editors. The introduction of ChatGPT (from OpenAI) in November 2022, followed by other generative AI models such as BERT (from Google), has revolutionized many aspects of our lives. The initially intense debate around its use in academia has abated somewhat, as the early ethical issues have been mostly resolved and the answers to various questions have become clearer. AI has various potential uses for almost every aspect of academic research, from scoping initial research ideas to analyzing data, proofreading manuscripts, and identifying suitable journals for article submission.1-3 Along with the initial hype came numerous reports of AI’s spectacular “fails,” some of which were amusing, and others more troublesome. The main problem with its use for academic research is its tendency to “hallucinate,” whereby it presents facts and even references that look plausible but are completely […]