Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
An author who verifies every citation an LLM produced before including it in a manuscript
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
An author who pleads 'the AI made that up' to excuse a fabricated citation in a published paper (not an acceptable defence)
Editorial commentary
Author responsibility for AI use is the principle that human authors retain full responsibility for the accuracy, integrity, originality, ethical sourcing, and freedom from plagiarism of all content in a scholarly work, regardless of which portions were drafted, suggested, or generated by an AI tool.
What this requires in practice
Operationally, this means authors must independently verify every factual claim, citation, and statistic an AI tool produced before it appears in the manuscript — the specific failure this guards against is hallucination, a fluent, confident, fabricated output that will not visibly announce itself as false. It also means ensuring AI-generated text does not constitute plagiarism of the model’s training data (AI-generated prose can closely reproduce phrasing from sources in its training set without attribution), and disclosing the AI use itself (see AI tool disclosure). An author cannot shift blame to the AI tool for an error that ends up in the published record — the accountability sits with the named human authors, full stop.
Why this is the reason AI cannot be listed as an author
This principle is the direct basis for the separate rule that AI systems cannot appear on the author byline (see AI co-authorship rejection): authorship requires the capacity to be held accountable for the work and to approve the final version, and an AI system, having no legal personhood, cannot bear that responsibility. Author responsibility for AI use is therefore the positive statement of where accountability actually sits, once AI is excluded from the byline.
Sources
ICMJE Recommendations (2023 update); COPE Position Statement, “Authorship and AI Tools” (13 February 2023).
Also known as
Human responsibility for AI output
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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