Understanding the Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Academic Writing: Metadata to the Rescue

This enables the identification of the text for which AI assistance has been used. How AI was used AI tools can be used for many different tasks: summarizing, translation, paraphrasing, finding related work and citations, etc. So, it is important to have information on how AI tools were used in the paper. For example, we can encode in the metadata that GPT -4 (so the "which") was used to summarize (the "how") and write the abstract (the "where").UNDERSTANDING THE IMP ACT OF AI IN ACADEMIC WRITING Let us consider now that we have a large corpus of papers and we want to know how many of them have used AI to summarize the abstract. Without metadata, all papers look the same (Figure 2, left), so we have to extract the text and either try to detect the use of AI in the abstract or find a disclosure of the authors that states the use of AI in the abstract. Instead if the proposed metadata has been added to the paper, we can just look at the how (summarizing) and where (abstract) to find the papers. The papers are now marked and can be easily identified (Figure 2, right). The metadata can be used to analyze many aspects of the use of AI in academic writing, for example, we can analyze: 1) The adoption of the different AI tools and their variations over time.