This Researcher Used ChatGPT to Write a Peer-Reviewed Paper

And why this should concern us

Aaron Schnoor
3 min readJul 6, 2024

It is widely known that students have relied on ChatGPT, OpenAI’s large language model (LLM), to write essays and academic papers. The issue became so pervasive that universities made headlines in 2023 when they began cracking down on AI-generated essays, forcing many students to turn away from ChatGPT.

But universities should have done more than crack down on student use of AI-generated writing. As it turns out, multiple researchers and teachers have been caught using ChatGPT over the past year to write and publish peer-reviewed papers.

Yes, you read that right—peer-reviewed papers.

Here’s just one example:

In 2023, a paper published in the academic journal Physica Scripta was retracted after readers noticed the phrase “Regenerate Response” in the text.

Why is the phrase “Regenerate Response” so startling to see? Because it’s an option that ChatGPT offers to users to resubmit the original query and generate new text.

When pressured, the authors admitted to using ChatGPT to write the paper.

According to a statement released by Physica Scripta in September of 2023:

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