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by KurtMueller 1176 days ago
| If he is using it to reword his papers but the content remains the same it's less concerning.

How is that less concerning? Rewording conclusions or the abstract, even subtly, can change the meaning of those words and of those sections.

1 comments

I don't see how this would be much different from a non-native English speaker getting a colleague to help with the English phrasing of a paper (this is very, very common).

As long as the original researcher reads what's been written, and agrees with it, and the output gives an accurate description of the procedure and results, there's no harm done that I can see.

Edit: I mean in general, not necessarily in this specific case. This guy seems a little...questionable...for other reasons.

> I don't see how this would be much different from a non-native English speaker getting a colleague to help with the English phrasing of a paper (this is very, very common).

It's as different as ChatGPT is from an English-speaking scientist colleague.

For example, a colleague will probably ask if they're not sure which is the intended meaning of a phrase. ChatGPT will generate one of the possible meanings.

so what? the author can still proofread it and decide if that was the right meaning.
Right. That's the author's responsibility, whether he or she is using ChatGPT, a human colleague, an old-school tool like Grammarly or classic Google Translate, or even older-school tools like paper dictionaries.

In all those cases, mistakes can be made and unintended meanings can creep in. The author has to check the output, definitely, but that doesn't mean those tools shouldn't be used at all.

the author can "proofread" it as written in another language with which they're arguably unqualified to work
Okay, how is that different from them using a (whatever)->English dictionary?
Using such a dictionary instead of the control, a human translator or interpreter, is likely to suffer from the same pitfalls: not knowing a language means you are more susceptible to making errors when the language should be nuanced, and scientific & academic papers seem to be to be nuance-critical productions when it comes to wording