The Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Nursing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most trending words in health care fields including nursing.1 An increasing number of institutions across the globe are placing AI as a priority area in research and education. Despite an increasing number of concerns on many aspects of AI,2 many institutes in other countries began to encourage their faculty members and students to use AI in preparing their papers and scholarly products. For instance, I was invited to Taiwan and gave a conference keynote on publications. During the Q/A session, an important question from the audience was how Advances in Nursing Science (ANS) views manuscripts written with the assistance of AI. I shared our current policy related to the use of AI in manuscript writing: “The journal does not consider Artificial Intelligence authoring tools to meet the requirements for Authorship as recommended by the ICMJE. The use of such tools may be included in the article’s Acknowledgements” (https://journals.lww.com/advancesinnursingscience/Pages/Instructions-for-Authors.aspx). The audience was concerned because their institutes actually encouraged them to use AI, and AI had been really helpful in creating scholarship works. I found a similar trend in South Korea when I was visiting there for another invited lecture. Many faculty members and students were using AI for their projects and scholarship works, which seemed to be encouraged by their government and institutes. In the U.S. institutes, although faculty members and students were originally prohibited from using an AI tool to prepare their classes and papers,3 many universities began to relax the restrictions with various guidelines in multiple areas (e.g., recommended practice for requiring the use of Generative AI in classes). New York and Los Angeles public schools blocked access to ChatGPT, an AI bot in January 2023, then removed the ban in May 2023.4,5 Yet, the faculty is still concerned that AI tools could generate fake scholarly products that would not exactly reflect the students’ learning or would not adequately and accurately reflect nursing knowledge. However, after my recent trips to Asian countries, I began to question if we are delaying our involvement in AI just because of our concerns on unpredictable and uncertain future with AI. Maybe, AI could provide a great tool that could help prepare well-crafted manuscripts for publication if the writers could check the validity of the content. Maybe, we are too worried about potential ethical issues, subsequently being late in the global game. I remember when we began to use electronic communications for manuscript submissions and grant proposal submissions. Before we began to use electronic communications, we needed to mail our manuscripts and grant proposals and wait for the results anxiously. When I got my first pink sheet from the National Institute of Health (NIH), it took more than a month for me to get the mail after the actual review group met. That became a history now. We are currently checking the results of NIH grant reviews through the website and we are receiving emails on decisions on our manuscripts that are submitted to journals. Now, we take it granted for submitting and getting results through electronic communications without any concerns. I also remember when I started my online studies in late 1990s. There were lots of concerns on the safety of Internet interactions. Some even told me how Internet-based research could be legitimate since people could fake themselves in the fantasy virtual world. I needed to attend full IRB board meeting to explain how my online survey and online forum studies would be safe. Looking back on it, the concerns were reasonable, but they should not be a big huddle for researchers. Now, online surveys and online forums are considered relatively safe, and nobody would raise a serious concern on human subject protection risks. I am wondering if we are raising similar concerns on AI technologies as we did for other new technology usages. I totally understand the risks involved in using AI tools in writing manuscripts for publications and grant proposals for research. Yet, if we have clear guidelines in place, could they be a great tool to facilitate nursing knowledge generation? With advances in AI technologies, could our current concerns be adequately addressed? Still, there are a number of questions to ask, but we begin to witness drastically increasing usages of AI in publications.6 —Eun-Ok Im, PhD, MPH, RN, CNS, FAANEditor