Aye, AI Captain!

Abstract

Before we say aye to an innovation whether in healthcare or other fields it is prudent to evaluate its merits and perils. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has created both a growing excitement and cautious wary amongst many in the medical and research fields. And this includes the field of medical publishing. AI is being used today across different fields, also known as machine intelligence, it focuses on building and managing technology that can learn to autonomously make decisions and carry out actions on behalf of a person. As the technology has become more embedded in everyday applications, the interest focused on seeking to emulate the human brain through the design of programs and algorithms with real-time processing. Much debate about AI’s potential to revolutionize is countered with significant concerns. There are many areas in which AI is valuable in publishing from simple formatting, checking of grammar to the more complex like-text auto-tagging to improve discoverability of research and much more. It can improve and speed up many processes in the editorial workflow. Some of its potential drawbacks include concerns about privacy and data security, loss of personal touch and limited emotional connection, bias and possibly discriminatory algorithms and ethical concerns. Such that the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) updated the criteria for authorship in the advent of AI. It states that chatbots should not be listed as authors because they cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of a work, and these responsibilities are required for authorship. Authors should not list AI and AI-assisted technologies as an author or co-author, nor cite AI as an author. Further, ICMJE issued that journals should require authors to disclose whether they used artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted technologies in the production of submitted work. Authors who use such technology should describe, in both the cover letter and the submitted work, how they used it. While AI surely has an enormous potential for great advances much of their power comes from their ability to outperform human abilities in terms of speed and accuracy. I believe that AI’s existence in the medical publishing field is unavoidable. It is poised to have a dramatic influence in the way we share new discoveries, health advances and findings in research and innovations. At its best, it can spread landmark breakthroughs instantaneously but this makes accountability very critical to its application. I hope that measures will be employed to ensure that humans run the system—not the other way around.