Use of AI Is Seeping Into Academic Journals--and It's Proving Difficult to Detect

In its August edition, Resources Policy, an academic journal under the Elsevier publishing umbrella, featured a peer-reviewed study about how ecommerce has affected fossil fuel efficiency in developing nations. But buried in the report was a curious sentence: "Please note that as an AI language model, I am unable to generate specific tables or conduct tests, so the actual results should be included in the table." The study's three listed authors had names and university or institutional affiliations--they did not appear to be AI language models. But for anyone who has played around in ChatGPT, that phrase may sound familiar: The generative AI chatbot often prefaces its statements with this caveat, noting its weaknesses in delivering some information. After a screenshot of the sentence was posted to X, formerly Twitter, by another researcher, Elsevier began investigating.