M. Ibrahim

I'm an associate editor of Philosophy & Public Affairs, but wasn't involved in the decision to publish Simon Goldstein's largely AI-written piece the other day. That was an interesting experiment, but it caught us before we'd come up with a policy on this obviously pressing issue. We've now formulated a policy, which goes into effect as soon as it's up on the website, but I'll share it here too, with the editor-in-chief (Jason Brennan)'s permission. TLDR: We don't want substantially AI-authored papers to be submitted to P&PA; we define what we mean by that, and how we'll enforce it. If you like using AI to write philosophy papers, and want to publish them in an academic journal, we encourage you to start your own. If, at any point from submission to after a paper is published, we discover that a (human) author's declaration that AI *wasn't* used to write the paper was false, we will reject or retract the paper and ban the (human) author from submitting to P&PA in the future. Here's the policy: Academic journals serve at least two functions: the promulgation of new knowledge, and identification and credentialing of talented researchers. There are many other means available to share new knowledge, but few for credentialing talented researchers, where "talented" means roughly: able, on their own or together with other researchers, to make and communicate significant progress on fundamental problems. Submitting AI-authored essays makes the task of identifying talented researchers harder. In addition, while it is at this time possible for a researcher to use AI to author a paper that is itself high quality, it is disproportionately unlikely that they will do so, and much more likely that the paper will have all the surface appearances of sophisticated work, but ultimately be insubstantial or incoherent. This makes it harder to peer review, and makes the task of peer review in general more onerous, at a time when it is already under significant strain.  Those who enjoy and value the products of AI writing have many other places where they can publish such work, notably online. There may also be a case for creating journals of AI-authored research. So there are very few benefits to publishing AI-authored work in existing academic journals, and, given the above, significant costs.  Our policy is therefore to prohibit the submission of AI-authored content to Philosophy & Public Affairs. We define AI-authored content as papers that are substantially written by AI. We distinguish this from the use of AI for light copy-editing (which we in general define as reorganising or condensing written work without rephrasing). We also emphasise that authors are entitled (indeed encouraged) to use AI while conducting their research, in whatever ways they choose.  To implement this policy, we require authors to declare that they have not used AI to author their paper, and to explicitly describe how they have used AI in the process of conducting the research that led to the paper. We will use the leading AI detection software at the time to verify the truthfulness of the former declaration. We note that AI detection software, including updated models, may be used throughout the review process, up to and including after publication. If at any point we discover that the author's declaration that AI was not used to author the paper's content was false, the paper will be rejected or retracted, and the author will be banned from further submission to Philosophy & Public Affairs.