Authors Must Have Intellectual Accountability and Thus Cannot Be ‘Brain-Dead’

Generative AI such as large language models (LLMs) have pervaded academic writing, including bioethics papers. Earp and colleagues have recently noted that the definition of authorship, like life supported by mechanical devices, is disaggregated and complexified by AI. Accordingly, AI has now enabled “… the creation of written material with relatively little human involvement that may nevertheless constitute an original work of scholarship”. This perceived ambiguity need not exist. Genuine human scholarship, at least in bioethics, needs to be centered around a human mind, with the latter embodied within a human brain. The mind could, particularly during the pursuit and generation of knowledge, be extended (as per Clark and Chalmers’s extended mind thesis) with the use of tools and technology, which might include generative AI. Just like a brain-dead individual is medically dead despite having its vital signs preserved by mechanical support, an individual that uses little or none of her own mind in enabling AI-generated papers cannot be considered an author. Neither should prompt-induced, AI-generated writings based on probability token matching be considered true scholarship.