Thank you for such a thoughtful and open response. I appreciate the practical difficulties you describe, and I accept that the way AI is currently being used by some contributors presents a genuine problem for the journal. I can understand why you felt that action was necessary.

Your question about how we determine who originated the central ideas is an important one. I suspect there will rarely be a simple answer. Ideas develop through reading, conversation, criticism and reflection, and the contribution of a colleague can sometimes be substantial without making them the author of the resulting work. Perhaps the more practical question is whether the author can demonstrate intellectual ownership of the argument, defend its reasoning and take responsibility for its claims.

I certainly don’t want to suggest that we have reached anything approaching an ideal relationship between AI and writing. My concern is more about the principles towards which we should be moving. I would hate us to settle on a distinction between human-written and AI-written prose that fails to recognise the legitimate role of AI in developing and expressing an author’s own thinking.

I welcome your willingness to reconsider the policy as experience develops. This is unfamiliar territory for all of us, and I suspect that finding the right balance will require precisely the kind of open discussion you have engaged in here.

Thank you again for taking my comments seriously.

Thanks John – appreciate you taking the time to respond to this and offer your insights. I agree with much of what you say, almost all indeed – and we will be structuring our policy to allow many of these aspects. Yet, some of this is not easily ascertained – for instance, just how does one determine if a person or AI originated the central ideas of an article?

I take the point about balance – but I would put back the point that we are nowhere near the AI/human utopia of ideas and writing you suggest. What has become clear to us is that your outline, which I think is very reasonable, and represents a responsible use of AI, is not how it is being used by a significant proportion of our contributors. There is not yet anything resembling balance. That’s not sustainable and we had to act to address it. I certainly hope that will change as we get used to AI and find ways to work with it.

As a writer who uses AI and who recently submitted an article examining the issue of its control, I feel that the BJGP’s position is not sufficiently balanced. AI has a legitimate and increasingly important role in writing, but that role needs to be understood properly. AI is here to stay. The door has been opened, and its introduction cannot be undone. The question is not whether AI should have a place in writing, but how it should be used responsibly.
I do not believe that AI should be used to originate the central ideas of an article. Those should arise from the author’s own experience, reading, reflection and intellectual work.
However, writers have always developed their work through discussion with colleagues. They ask for criticism, test arguments, explore alternative formulations and seek help in making difficult ideas clearer. Such exchanges can influence the finished article profoundly without transferring its intellectual ownership.
AI can fulfil a similar role. It can help authors test their ideas, identify weaknesses, clarify distinctions and improve expression. Yet AI is not equivalent to a human colleague. It can reinforce assumptions, invent evidence or offer plausible but unhelpful objections. The analogy is useful in describing the role AI can play in an author’s work, not in suggesting that the two are interchangeable. The essential requirement is that the author retains intellectual direction, exercises independent judgement and accepts responsibility for the final work.
The appropriate distinction, therefore, is not simply between human-written and AI-assisted prose. It is between using AI to assist an author’s intellectual work and delegating that work to AI. A responsible policy should recognise that difference. Without such a distinction, a policy intended to protect intellectual integrity risks restricting legitimate forms of assistance while failing to address the more fundamental question of who is responsible for the ideas and arguments being published.

There is a paradox with the use of AI and translations. Every author takes responsibility for the content, but how can an author be satisfied that an AI-generated translation in another language is capturing the nuances and subtleties of their initial work? Almost by definition, one might argue, they are not in a position to assess that – and editors can’t know either. 

Another difficulty is that there’s no way for us to easily tell the difference between AI-generated content without any editing and that which has been edited to some extent. Translations come back with very high AI-generated scores, often 100%, and we are unable to determine the details around the usage. (Of course, this problem applies to all content, whether translated or not.)

So, the question is where we draw the line for AI-detection and translations, and the honest answer at the moment is I don’t know, but I don’t think we can reasonably allow papers with very high AI-generated content through. It is a very live issue, and I’m acutely aware that the current policy will be more prejudicial to authors whose English is not their first language.

However, the current situation where we are receiving submissions which are substantially or wholly AI-generated has created a situation where, at least temporarily, we need to have this policy. It will be kept under careful review, and I’m very aware of the difficulties.