Recently, ChatGPT was named as one of the co-authors of a medical pre-print. Can a chatbot be credited as an author of a research paper? What are the ethics behind such a decision, and does it make practical sense in the field of academia? Can an AI chatbot really make contributions relevant enough for it to be given co-authorship credit? Well, maybe not. Let us see why AI models such as ChatGPT should not be used to write a researcher’s thesis, much less be credited as one of its co-authors.

AI authorship and major publishers

There are two strong cases to be made against the use of AI in drafting academic papers. First, AI cannot take responsibility for the information it adds to a research paper. Second, generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT do not actually make independent intellectual contributions to the research in the same way that a human researcher would. Both these cases are agreed upon by two of the largest research publishers in the field of academia, Springer Nature and Taylor and Francis. Let us explore the ideas of responsibility and intellectual contribution through the perspectives of major publishers and understand if AI chatbots count as authors of a text or not.