Post

Ben Williamson
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social

What's most upsetting me as a journal editor is that many papers we receive where AI use is disclosed for editing and language refinement actually appear to have been ruined rather than improved by AI. We get what seem like promising underpinning studies, but totally obscured by over-complex text.

Ben Williamson
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social

This is different to the lazy auto-generated synthetic manuscripts we frequently receive. The ones I mean often sadly look like PhD or early career projects where the data seem good but chat or claude has garbled the presentation of the analysis. Writing reject letters for these is hard work.

3 reposts51 likes

Ben Williamson
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social

I wish our sector could support academic writing better, especially for early career and non-anglophone writers. Otherwise they end up punished with rejection when they turn to AI, convinced by current discourse that it's the solution to academic communication. Seen too many papers ruined by AI now.

Adrian Harley
@adrianharley.bsky.social

As an editor, I’ve been trying to tell people that AI text replaces easy-to-fix problems with hard-to-fix ones. But my employer is all in on AI, so it’s hard to get the message out.