Thoughts on AI's Impact on Scholarly Communications? An Interview with ChatGPT - The Scholarly Kitchen

"As 2022 drew to a close, a great deal of popular attention was drawn to the latest artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, which was released in November 2022 by OpenAPI. (As an aside, the company has a had a very interesting background and funding, which has produced a number of important AI advances). Machine learning, natural language processing and textual creation have made significant advances over the past decade. When the first auto-generation of content from structured data became commercially viable about a decade ago, it was reasonably easy to discern machine generated content. This is increasingly no longer the case. Content distributors and assessors of content, be that for scholarly peer-review, for academic credentialling, or simply those who consume content should be aware of the capabilities of these tools and should not be dismissive of them. Given the range of questions in scholarly communications around the application of AI, I thought it might be interesting to see what the ChatGPT’s response would be to some of these, along with other literary/tech questions, and to share them with you. You can review for yourself whether you think the responses are good ones or not and, if you didn’t know the source of the responses, whether you could tell that they were derived from a machine. Copied below are the questions and responses. I have not edited the responses in any way from what was output by the ChatGPT. It seems we’ve moved well beyond the “Turing Test” for assessing the intelligence of a machine. You may notice there is something formulaic to some of the responses, but it’s only discernible after looking over several of them. Though it is important to reflect that the machine doesn’t “know” whether the answers are correct or not, only that they are statically valid responses to the questions posed...."