The only reason you’ll ever need not to write with AI — The Carlson Lab

I look at all of this, and the only thing I can think is: why take that risk? I know that my ideas and my words are my own; I find plagiarism fundamentally repulsive as a practice, and the only reason I show up to work is that I enjoy my craft. But if I ever let GenAI near my writing, I’m exposing myself to risk from plagiarism accusations—whether or not the GenAI tool smuggles in something that does, actually, constitute plagiarism. If somebody comes to me in 20 years and says “Are these your original ideas and words?” about even a single sentence of my writing, I need to be able to answer yes—no reservations, no loopholes, no room for error.
Here’s the biggest problem.

Academic writing is a collaborative venture, and in my experience, very few researchers have a comprehensive conversation about GenAI use before they collaborate. Everyone tends to think that their practices are normal, well-reasoned, and probably pretty similar to where other people they respect have landed on AI—whether that’s abstaining from it altogether, just using it to code, or wholly embracing it across your workflow.

That means that all of us have the ability to end each other’s career. This has always been true—on the 100+ papers I’ve written in my career, I’ve trusted every single coauthor (and they’ve trusted me) not to introduce a single sentence that will detonate our lives somewhere between journal submission and retirement. We don’t usually think about this as a problem, because we trust the other people we work with. But GenAI adds back the possibility that other people will introduce writing into your paper that can be credibly accused of plagiarism.

Read the full article at carlsonlab.bio