About
Academ-AI documents the adverse effects of artificial intelligence (AI) in academia, particularly suspected instances of AI being used to author research without appropriate declaration.
The articles listed on this site have been identified based on phrases that strongly suggest AI use (highlighted in each quoted passage). If you believe that an article has been wrongly included, please let me know at acai@academ-ai.info.
If you suspect the use of AI in a published research article, please reach out with:
- The citation (in any style); please include a URL or DOI if possible
- The passage(s) that appear to be AI-generated
- Your name if you wish to be credited for your contribution
At present, I am documenting journal articles and conference papers/proceedings only. Books, book chapters, preprints, blog posts, and other media are out of scope at least for the time being.
What to look for
The contributions of a chatbot can often be identified by the use of key phrases, such as:
As of my last knowledge update…
As an AI language model…
Chatbot responses can also be identified by their conversational style, which does not fit in with academic prose. Elements of chatbot style include:
- Liberal use of first-person singular pronouns
- Use of discourse markers, such as “certainly”
As a consequence of the developers’ attempts to prevent harmful output, chatbots are often verbosely conservative, generating multiple sentences explaining why they cannot do as asked. Examples include:
- Explaining that they have no access to certain data
- Referring the user to experts in the relevant field
- Offering alternative subject matter that the bot could discuss
Metadata
Publications are cited using the metadata provided by the publisher even where implausible. For example, Narayanan (2014) refers to a “knowledge update in January 2022” despite alleged publication eight years prior.1 Since the purpose of Academ-AI is to highlight publishing oversights, no attempt will be made to resolve these errors.
Categories
I assign categories to the articles listed according to my own best judgement. There are four kinds of categories:
1. Subject categories
Based on the top level of the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system, each article is labeled as one or more of the following:
- general works
- philosophy, psychology, and religion
- auxiliary sciences of history
- world history
- history of the Americas
- local history of the Americas
- geography, anthropology, and recreation
- social sciences
- political sciencce
- law
- education
- music
- fine arts
- language and literature
- science
- medicine
- agriculture
- technology
- military science
- naval science
- library and information science
2. Publication types
Each article is classified as:
- journal—journal articles
- conference—conference papers and proceedings
3. Post-publication changes
Where an erratum, corrigendum, or other correction has been made with specific reference to the undeclared use of AI, the article is labeled with “erratum”. Hopefully, this category will grow larger over time.
Occasionally, publishers appear to have retroactively corrected LLM-induced errors without informing readers. These instances are marked as “stealth revision.”
3. Indexing
Articles published in journals known to be included in widely used indices, such as Web of Science, are labeled as such. These labels are a work-in-progress and likely incomplete at this time.
Similar projects
Other researchers, most notably Dr. Guillaume Cabanac (Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse), have compiled examples of undeclared AI. Where these are known to overlap with Academ-AI, their work is noted and linked on the relevant page.
Logo
The Ac-AI berry is based on a vector icon generated by Google Gemini.
