In the past few months, we have witnessed the emergence of novel large language models (LLM) reaching breakthrough performance on NLP tasks. These include ChatGPT and Galactica, which are AI assistants that can produce long and good quality content that can be seeded for authors’ work. Because of their recent emergence, the norms around the use of such technology is not fully established, yet. Hence, it is important to acknowledge its use and elaborate on how it has been employed.
Specifically, we define three levels of AI assistance usage: insignificant, low and substantial. We will group the different use cases according to these three categories and we will define CEUR-WS stance.
Insignificant. Activities like: i) paraphrasing and refining the manuscript content (using Grammarly or other spell checkers), and ii) smart composition (via predictive keyboards) are widely accepted and do not need any acknowledgement.
Low. The use of AI tools for searching and generating literature review is acceptable upon authors’ checks. Authors must review the content and adjust/add references to line up with the narrative of their manuscript. In case of generating unoriginal content (i.e., definition, or description of well-known concepts) may be acceptable provided that the authors have checked it to be accurate and included proper references to the original content.
Substantial. Using AI assistants for generating new ideas as well as new text is unacceptable. Most of the generated content may derive from existing work. Potential issues with such practice are related to originality, plagiarism, ownership, and authorship, whose consequences and impact are not yet clear.
Regardless of the cases above, CEUR-WS publishes original work from named authors (human beings), and thus contributions from AI assistants can only be stated in the acknowledgements and/or by suitable references at the original research papers. We require that all authors and workshop editors adhere to these guidelines. Their violation will lead to the removal of the published paper or the whole volume, similar to our procedures dealing with plagiarism. As a consequence, AI assistants or any other computer programs cannot be named as authors of a paper.
As this technology is in current development, we plan to continuously review this policy in the upcoming months.
This policy section is partly inspired by the “ACL 2023 Policy on AI Writing Assistance” available here.
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