ChatGPT for research and academic writing?
I have been part of so many discussions about using ChatGPT in research and scientific writing. I have attended several talks at conferences on this. I was indecisive. Last night, a friend asked about it again and I think I found a logical solution.
The question we should ask is “Can ChatGPT write better than us?” If no, do not use it. If yes, improve your writing.
Of course, we can argue that it can be used for grammar check and improving text quality. Yes, but so do Grammarly, and I am satisfied with it. We can also argue that it can be used for statistical analysis, yes, but so do Matlab, Python, r, SPSS, Stata etc., where the robustness of the results are guaranteed.
ChatGPT has many great applications, but I think scientific research is not one of them. Overall, I observe greatest researchers use very few softwares (these days too many for everything) other than data analysis.
In the end nobody knows what is right and what not; it is more of an ethical question I believe. But we can have our stance; mine is that I do not want to be part of any study where even a single sentence is generated by AI.
The cover image is created by https://deepai.org/