Here's a first... I just got an email because ChatGPT suggested an article I wrote to somebody. Could I send them a copy? Except, I never wrote the article, it doesn't exist. PLEASE realize right now that this tool isn't pulling out cool references for you. It's making plausible titles and matching them to authors names.
@L_howes Thanks for flagging this up, it's a worry for us in non-fic publishing who rely on their authors doing their research diligently.
Most do a thorough job, but others are flaky at providing full and accurate references at the best of times; I dread to think of the results if they find ChatGPT or an equivalent and decide they'll leave it all to a bot. And we certainly don't have the resources to verify every citation.
Serena, I think your comment is exactly on point. But verification of references has been a problem before, and it is up to us to advocate for an academic culture that will no longer tolerate such misrepresentation (lies, actually) – regardless of whether the source is a poor bot who is trying to do its best, or whether it is a human who is taking deliberate liberties with truth. After all, the author is fully responsible for their words, regardless of how the those words were generated.
I have written on facticity, authorship, and academic integrity in the Sentient Syllabus Project e.g. here https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/generated-misconduct
You are right that the problem is that verification does not scale. But we can make it more scalable. A simple first step would be to require a collection of quoted text to accompany a manuscript submission (could be a photograph of a historic document), with a statement what precisely is being referenced. Plus, a link to the source if it is online. That is easy to do – for an real reference, and for a generated reference, requiring this would force authors to verify that the paper actually exists; a welcome side-effect might be that such verification is likely more work than getting an actual reference in the first place.
As a corollary, I think we should deemphasize paraphrasing and teach our students to quote instead.
Of course there would still be those who would commit fraud, but I would assume those would be in the vast minority.
Thank you!
🙂
