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20 April 2023
MDPI’s Updated Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence and Authorship
Our updated guidelines on Authorship recognize that tools such as the AI chatbot ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) do not meet authorship criteria and thus cannot be listed as authors on manuscripts. While AI can contribute intellectually to the writing process, it is now widely accepted that it cannot take responsibility of the content it produces.
Authors are fully responsible for the originality, validity, and integrity of the content of their manuscript and must ensure that it complies with all of MDPI’s publication ethics policies.
AI technology can still be used when writing academic papers. However, this must be appropriately declared when submitting a paper to an MDPI journal. In such cases, authors are required to be fully transparent, within the “Acknowledgments” section, about which tools were used, and to describe in detail how the tools were used, in the “Materials and Methods” section.
Our new guideline is in line with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) position statement on the use of AI and AI-assisted technology in manuscript preparation. It holds that "authors are fully responsible for the content of their manuscript, even those parts produced by an AI tool, and are thus liable for any breach of publication ethics."
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