ChatGPT, who?

Abstract

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a rapidly growing and highly interdisciplinary field that touches all areas of science. However, the impact of generative AI in the scientific publication process is currently still uncertain, although some problem areas and dilemmas are already emerging. Currently, it is ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) from OpenAI, that produces very naturalistic texts, seemingly written by humans, on specific prompts or context. ChatGPT has been trained on a large dataset of texts from the Internet to understand and (re)produce a wide range of topics and language styles. While AI can be helpful in the academic process to transform large amounts of data into useful and actionable information, which would not be possible for a human researcher. Specifically, ChatGPT can facilitate the text production of scientific papers, assist the editing processes within scientific journals, but it also runs the risk of leading to poorer quality scientific papers, as the linguistic design and also the revision process itself can highlight errors that have crept in, as well as stimulate new ideas and be part of the engagement with a subject matter. In addition, AI only knows the content it has been trained with and it has a lack of ability to generalize from one task to another. All of these are among the topics that will continue to occupy us in this journal in the future. Digital Psychology does not intend to ban AI-generated texts completely but would like to ask authors to mark passages or graphics of their scientific work that were created with the help of AI and to reference the respective program. It is not desired to cite AI as the author, but it is desired to cite AI as the software used. We would like to point out that AI is also just a tool to produce content and therefore the authors have a corresponding obligation to check and critically use the products of AI. In this issue we also discussed different opinions about AI. We are also expanding our Editorial Board and would like to welcome Michael Zeiler (Medical University of Vienna) as Associate Editor. Furthermore, we would like to point out the possibility for proposals of Special Issues. We have also included three articles on different areas of Digital Psychology in the current issue and wish everyone an interesting read.