Just 2 days after Carlos Chaccour and Matthew Rudd published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine about controlling malaria, an editor of the journal shared with them a letter he had received raising "robust objections". The letter was well written, thought Chaccour, a physician-scientist at the University of Navarra, and Rudd, a statistician at the University of the South. But something unsettled them: The letter cited some of their previous work that did not support its claims. Because the researchers knew artificial intelligence (AI) can fabricate references, they suspected the letter was written by a machine.

That was the start of Chaccour and Rudd’s investigation into more than 730,000 letters published over the past 20 years. They found that from 2023–2025, a small group of "prolific debutante" authors suddenly appeared in the top 5% of letter writers. They suspect much of the rise was driven by programs such as ChatGPT, the generative AI chatbot that debuted in 2022.

Other studies have documented a rise in the share of research articles that bear signs of AI-written text. But this study appears to be the first to examine the phenomenon among letters to the editor – a key venue for postpublication reviews, but also a potential avenue for exploitation by unscrupulous authors aiming to pad their CVs.

Source https://www.science.org/content/article/letters-scientific-journals-surge-prolific-debutante-authors-likely-use-ai

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