What is a journal? What is research? What is AI’s role in either of these things? These and other existential questions have been bothering academics and publishers alike since the advent of Generative AI tools for common use nearly four years ago. One byproduct of this has been a sudden boost to the worth of philosophers, as they exhibit both the skills to prompt and analyze AI outputs, as well as the critical faculties to debate their use.
Speaking as someone with a philosophy degree, this is of course all completely marvellous. However, not everyone is happy at some of the philosophical takes on how is being used, particularly when it comes to publishing and research integrity issues, which at heart show a fundamental misunderstanding of what philosophy is about. And this in turn may help us understand better how we can manage AI more effectively.
Questions and answers
In August, the Cabells indexed Philosophy & Public Affairs (PPA) caused a minor furor after it published an article written mostly by AI. The journal not only acknowledged this, but it did so knowingly in order to spark debate about the nature of scholarship, research and academic articles. In a response to questions about the use of AI, the journal’s editor was reported to have said in an article in the Daily Nous that the journal had decided to publish the article in the hope key questions would be asked:
“Whether journals should require even more prominent disclosure in cases involving AI assistance on this scale is a reasonable question and something PPA and other journals will need to think through as such cases become more common. Indeed, we’ll be interested to see what arguments emerge in the comments on Simon’s post—they may well inform whatever policy we eventually adopt.”
The author, Simon Goldstein, in the same report also said he wanted to use AI to ask key philosophical questions: “My goal is to discover new, important truths. I think that using AI well increases the amount of new, important truths that are discovered.”
Rage bait
Asking such questions is fundamental to philosophy, even if those questions can sometimes cause people to enter into a complete meltdown at the seeming pointlessness of it all. For example, I remember in one early class in Moral Philosophy we seriously addressed the question of whether natural parents were the right people to bring up children – the point being that even if the answer is ‘well, duh – yes’, asking the question and building a response develops critical skills and uncovers insights we might not have hitherto understood. In the same way, an outright ban of AI in article writing might seem obvious, but it helps to question and test it before creating a policy.
The sheer weight of responses to the original article and editor’s comments alone have justified the decision to publish by PPA and has clearly informed their new policy to place strict limits on the use of AI in research and article writing. In doing so, it has helped them quite nicely define what it is we want from an article; what the actual purpose is of scholarly communication in philosophy and other fields. In announcing the new policy, one of the journal’s associate editors stated that, “Academic journals serve at least two functions: the promulgation of new knowledge, and identification and credentialing of talented researchers.” With so many questions surrounding the use of AI, we seem to have got at least one answer to one of publishing’s most enduring questions.
Photo by Valentin Kremer on Unsplash
