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Hey friends,
Recently, I conducted 9 workshops in 9 different universities about research strategies, literature reviews, writing, publishing
With more than 2,000 participants in total.
I enjoyed the sessions. Lots of discussion. Lots of curiosity.
But what surprised me most was this:
The same question kept coming up again and again.
“Is it actually ethical to use AI in academic writing?”
This touched on AI detectors and fear of being rejected
I’m sure many researchers are quietly asking themselves the same thing
We’re going through a massive transition period where writing is now much easier than ever before
Everyone is experimenting or has experimented with generative AI.
Here’s what I usually tell researchers: AI is a tool, not a replacement
So the issue is not AI itself.
It’s how you use it and what you do with it
Ethics is really about (your) responsibility.
Imagine you ask AI to write a whole section of your manuscript.
You get something that looks good, promising and even convincing
now, it’s tempting to just paste it into your manuscript without checking it properly
Then, later, reviewers discover your section made up some references to documents and papers that do not exist.
This is not an AI problem anymore but a transparency & accountability problem
AI will never be an author and cannot held responsible for the words written in your paper
You (and your co-author(s)) do.
Now, back to using AI.
It feels like cheating. Before, writing a paper would take days/weeks. We would spend time writing, revising, refining and so on and so on
Now AI can do that much faster
Quick analogies:
· Spellcheck is faster than human proofreading
· Using reference managers saves us a massive amount of time formatting citations/references
· Softwares are faster than calculating everything manually
Technology has always changed research workflows.
The real issue has always been ownership.
A few pieces of advice:
- you are the author, not AI. Your contribution. Your responsibility
- AI helps to improve clarity, structure and organization of your paper. But the main argument is yours
- Publishers and journals have AI policies in place. Be familiar with them, especially on the disclosure of AI
- AI makes mistakes (some people call that hallucinations). Check everything it provides
- Don’t upload sensitive data to AI tools. They don’t all handle data securely
- Your research, your thinking, not AI’s. You should be capable of explaining and defending your argument
- AI is a tool. Not your replacement
So the conversation should move beyond: “Can we use AI?”
we should probably ask:
“How do we use it responsibly?”
Because in the end, good research has always been defined by:
• rigor
• honesty
• critical thinking
• accountability
And those responsibilities still belong to us, researchers
Not the machines
Well, that’s all for this week
Let me know what you think, I read every response
See you next week,
Jamal