Science in the Era of ChatGPT, Large Language Models and Generative AI: Challenges for Research Ethics and How to Respond

Since the release of popular large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, the transformative impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on broader society has been unprecedented. This is particularly alarming for science and its conquest of truth (Chomsky et al., 2023). Generative AI and, particularly, conversational AI based on language models has set new ethical dilemmas for knowledge, epistemology and research practice. From authorship, to misinformation, biases, fairness and safety of interactions with human subjects, research ethics boards need to adapt to this new era in order to protect research integrity and set high-quality ethical standards for research conduct (van Dis et al., 2023). This paper focuses on reviewing these challenges with the aim of laying foundations for a timely and effective response. ChatGPT is an AI chatbot released in November 2022 by OpenAI. It is a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a type of artificial deep neural network with a number of parameters in the order of billions. It is designed to process sequential input data, i.e. natural language, without labeling (self-supervised learning), but with remarkable capabilities for parallelization that significantly reduce training time. The model is further enhanced by a combination of supervised and reinforcement learning based on past conversations as well as human feedback to fine-tune the model and its responses (Stiennon et al., 2020; Gao,