Tools such as ChatGPT threaten transparent science; here are our ground rules for their use

It has been clear for several years that artificial intelligence (AI) is gaining the ability to generate fluent language, churning out sentences that are increasingly hard to distinguish from text written by people. Last year, Nature reported that some scientists were already using chatbots as research assistants -- to help organize their thinking, generate feedback on their work, assist with writing code and summarize research literature (Nature 611, 192–193; 2022). But the release of the AI chatbot ChatGPT in November has brought the capabilities of such tools, known as large language models (LLMs), to a mass audience. Its developers, OpenAI in San Francisco, California, have made the chatbot free to use and easily accessible for people who don't have technical expertise. Millions are using it, and the result has been an explosion of fun and sometimes frightening writing experiments that have turbocharged the growing excitement and consternation about these tools.