ChatGPT: To Bot or Not to Bot?

George D. Lundberg, MD

An internet bot, web robot, robot or simply just a bot is a software application that runs automated tasks over the internet, usually with the intent to imitate human activity on the internet, such as messaging, on a large scale.

One particular bot, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), owned by capped-profit company OpenAI, is taking the information world by storm. Some liken its potential to create change as historically comparable to the hand calculator, Google, Amazon, the iPhone, and Wikipedia.

If robots can write medical papers (they can), how will medical journal authors, editors, publishers, and readers deal with that?

Fortunately, our planet hosts a not-for-profit organization called The World Association of Medical Editors (WAME) (disclosure: I am one of some 20 founders of WAME) that was created in response to the internet and world wide web, for just this kind of issue.

On January 20, 2023, WAME published a position paper in open access, "Recommendations on ChatGPT and Chatbots in Relation to Scholarly Publications." There are nine authors (all are officers or directors of WAME), and the document formally represents the position of the Board of Directors.

The introductory materials on this paper are extraordinarily instructive, and I recommend that each of you reads it completely, even if only to protect yourself from misinformation.

The formal WAME recommendations:

Chatbots cannot be authors.
Authors should be transparent when chatbots are used and provide information about how they were used.
Authors are responsible for the work performed by a chatbot in their paper (including the accuracy of what is presented, and the absence of plagiarism) and for appropriate attribution of all sources (including the material produced by the chatbot).
Editors need appropriate tools to help them detect content generated or altered by AI and these tools must be available regardless of their ability to pay.

Please understand that efforts to use and attempts to regulate the further development of this astounding new resource are very early and very much a work in progress.

George D. Lundberg, MD, is contributing editor at Cancer Commons, president of the Lundberg Institute, executive advisor at Cureus, and a clinical professor of pathology at Northwestern University. Previously, he served as editor-in-chief of JAMA (including 10 specialty journals), American Medical News, and Medscape.

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Credits:
Lead image: iStock/Getty Images
Image 1: George D. Lundberg, MD

Any views expressed above are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of WebMD or Medscape.

Cite this: ChatGPT: To Bot or Not to Bot? - Medscape - Jan 25, 2023.

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