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A sensible policy about refereeing in the age of AI

Philosopher J.P. Messina (Purdue) kindly gave permission to share what he posted on FB recently, and it seems to me his policy is a good one:

I have refereed two papers this week that were pretty clearly written or heavily revised by LLMs. New policy: unless editors have an AI-use policy which requires AI-use disclosure and checks for obvious signs of non-disclosed use, and unless author’s disclosure is shared with reviewers, I will not be accepting their referee requests. For context, in each of the last three years, I’ve refereed 20-30 papers for a variety of journals. But if your journal can’t be bothered with doing basic work to check for academic integrity, I can’t be bothered with ensuring that work submitted to it meets whatever ‘standards’ remain. And for “authors”: except in rare cases, if you don’t have time to write it, I don’t have to time to read it.

What do readers (and journal editors) think? Are there other approaches that referees should consider?

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One response to “A sensible policy about refereeing in the age of AI”

  1. Michel-Antoine Xhignesse

    I haven’t encountered this yet, as far as I can tell (though I did recently get a paper that was wholly plagiarized from a book chapter). Until I do, I’m still happy to just accept referee requests when they come in.

    That said, I’m entirely on board with the spirit of the thing. If you didn’t write it, I don’t want to read it. Moreover, if I start getting too many chatbot papers to referee at any one journal, I will simply stop refereeing for them altogether. This is not a big loss to any given journal on its own, but it would, in those circumstances, be a real boon to me.

    I would probably be more compromising if I wasn’t already deluged with chatbot slop in all other areas of my life, from emails to student work to social media feeds. But since that’s the way the world is, my tolerance is zero.

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