Chatbots Are Writing Key Parts of Biomedical Papers

Researchers looking into the subject of artificial intelligence have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of their colleagues are using it to help write their papers. The study in Science Advances estimates that 14% of the abstracts of biomedical research papers—one in seven—used an AI tool such as ChatGPT in some fashion, reports Nature. They didn't survey their peers to find this out, however. Instead, they searched for telltale words that AI bots tend to use more than humans, per the New York Times. Examples include "delves," "crucial," "potential," and "accentuates," though there are more than 450 in all.

"I would think for something as important as writing an abstract of your paper, you would not do that," study author Dmitry Kobak of the University of Tubingen in Germany tells the Times. For the record, Kobak says he and his team did not use AI to write their new study. The percentage might well be an undercount. Researcher Mingmeng Geng of the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris tells Nature that AI tools are getting more sophisticated about overusing certain words—and authors who don't want to get caught are better at removing them.