The perils and perks of AI tools

A growing number of institutions accept that students and researchers utilize AI tools in their research and drafting processes. Some universities actively encourage, through both subsidy and technical facilitation, the use of these programs. For instance, the University of Oxford became the world’s first university to offer all its students and faculty a free subscription to ChatGPT. Still, we find our clients to be uniquely discerning; they want to be certain that what they submit and publish is factually accurate, grammatically flawless, and captures their characteristic writing style and voice. These are currently limitations of generative AI tools, such as Claude and ChatGPT, and can land students and tenured academics in hot water when it comes to submitting demonstrably original work. That is to say nothing, of course, about the perils of feeding AI programs your precious research.

How we can help

We are being approached more and more by PhD students and authors who employ AI tools and programs to draft their manuscripts. The tools offer convenience, speed, and the impression of getting the job done. However, we are extremely skilled at editing all kinds of academic manuscripts and, owing to a proliferation in demand for so-called ‘AI humanizing’, we have done (and continue to do) considerable research on the syntactic and linguistic patterns frequently identified in AI-drafted work:

• Are your sentences of a suspiciously even length over the course of a long manuscript?
• Does the writing rely on increasingly common ‘giveaway’ constructions?
• Is nuance only attempted through negative/contrastive juxtaposition, rather than effortful exposition and conceptual clarification?
• Does your research ‘show its working’, or does it present research as a fait accompli?
• Does the text fail to express a living voice and make its reader glaze over from one paragraph to the next?
• Does the text incorporate citations with bungled details and errant metadata?

The identification of such patterns and issues can lead to your works’ disqualification from publication and can also cause painful reputational damage, particularly if the peer-review process is unblinded at any stage. If the text in question is for academic credit, you risk meaningfully impacting any reference letters you will receive from examiners and mentors. Your preferred letter-writers may refuse to give recommendations if they have reason to doubt your academic integrity.

Sometimes, verdicts declaring a text ‘AI generated’ are erroneous and unfair, indicating a ‘false positive’ result. Such thwarts to publishing make it all the more worthwhile to have your work carefully checked and copy-edited (whether lightly or substantively) by an experienced team of researchers and writers, such as those at Lex Academic. You might be aware that there are tools online and for purchase that use AI to subsequently ‘refine’ AI-generated text, but these typically exacerbate and further embed the problem, as they are based on the very same LLMs that produce the drafts of your text. Owing to this, professed ‘AI text refiners’ do not enable you to capably outmanoeuvre the spectre of being accused of using AI to write your work. Their apparently iterative process embeds, rather than resolves, the problem.

Lex Academic will never employ AI tools in our editing process. We have professional indemnity and professional liability insurance to the value of £10M to reflect the seriousness with which we take our editorial and research work. We have spent decades honing the skills of academic research, writing, and editing. It is our justifiable pride in these skills that make us an invaluable partner to thousands of the world’s top academics and public figures. To us, a five-star service is not merely met when our clients are happy: we likewise need to be delighted in, and proud of, the work we deliver. 100% satisfaction needs to apply on both sides of the equation.

Get in touch today

Please get in touch with our Managing Editor detailing your editorial requirements. We would be honoured to help you on the road to success while defusing and removing the stress that the world of AI has caused academics of all stripes.