Journal article
Responsibility is not required for authorship
- Abstract:
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The Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) maintains that AIs (artificial intelligences) cannot be authors of academic papers, because they are unable to take responsibility for them. COPE appears to have the answerability sense of responsibility in mind. It is true that AIs cannot be answerable for papers, but responsibility in this sense is not required for authorship in the sciences. I suggest that ethics will be forced to follow suit in dropping responsibility as a criterion for authorship or rethinking its role. I put forward three options for authorship: dropping responsibility as a criterion for authorship, retaining it and excluding AIs, but at the cost of substantial revision of our practices, or requiring only local responsibility for an intellectual contribution.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
Actions
Access Document
- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 143.6KB, Terms of use)
-
- Publisher copy:
- 10.1136/jme-2024-109912
Authors
- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/0505m1554
- Grant:
- AH/W005077/1
- Publisher:
- BMJ Publishing Group
- Journal:
- Journal of Medical Ethics More from this journal
- Volume:
- 51
- Issue:
- 4
- Pages:
- 230-232
- Publication date:
- 2024-05-15
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-03-24
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1473-4257
- ISSN:
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0306-6800
- Pmid:
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38749650
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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1997915
- Local pid:
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pubs:1997915
- Deposit date:
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2024-07-16
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Neil Levy
- Copyright date:
- 2024
- Rights statement:
- © Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2024. Re-use permitted under CC BY. Published by BMJ. This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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