Fears over ChatGPT’s growing role in peer review have been raised after a Dutch researcher claimed that a reviewer who rejected his paper recommended a handful of fictitious publications invented by an AI chatbot.
Robin Bauwens, assistant professor of leadership and human resources management at Tilburg University, told Times Higher Education that he was perplexed when a reviewer at an Emerald Publishing journal suggested he familiarise himself with several literature reviews in his field by Dutch academics unknown to him.
“We were baffled at not knowing four reviews in our own field – the Dutch names also suggested peers working close by in a related field…[whom], being employed by a Dutch university, I felt I should have known,” explained Dr Bauwens.
“We got a strange feeling and checked GPT-2, which confirmed that these suggestions were AI-generated fakes,” said the social scientist on the apparently invented journal papers and fictitious authors presented to him.
