Authorship Without Writing: Large Language Models and the Senior Author Analogy

Abstract: The use of large language models (LLMs) in bioethical, scientific, and medical writing remains controversial. While there is broad agreement in some circles that LLMs cannot count as authors, there is no consensus about whether and how humans using LLMs can count as authors. In many fields, authorship is distributed among large teams of researchers, some of whom -- including paradigmatic "senior authors" who guide and determine the scope of a project and ultimately vouch for its integrity -- may not write a singl e word. In this paper, we argue that LLM use (under specific conditions) is analogous to a form of senior authorship. On this view, the use of LLMs, even to generate complete drafts of research papers, can be considered a legitimate form of authorship according to the accepted criteria in many fields. We conclude that either such use should be recognized as legitimate, or current criteria for authorship require fundamental revision. AI use declaration: Chat GPT version 5 was used to help format Box 1. AI wa s not used for any other part of the preparation or writing of this manuscript. This is a pre print of a paper that has been submitted to a journal. It has not yet gone through peer review. Authorship Without Writing: Large Language Models and the "Senior Author" Analogy Clint Hurshman, Sebastian Porsdam Mann, Julian Savulescu, Brian D. Earp I. Introduction The use of large language models (LLMs) in bioethics as well as scientific and medical writing continues to be controversial. Thus far, there has been broad agreement -- for example, among medical publishers -- that LLMs cannot count as authors, but there is still no consensus about the status of LLM - assisted text production as a form of writing, and by extension, the status of LLM users as authors. Here, we contribute to this debate by exploring -- and drawing analogies to -- the collaborative nature of writing, and t he distributed character of authorship, in many domains of research.