The executive editor emailed back to say that the article aligned with the scope of the journal but that some formatting amendments were required. Also, it lacked a statement on whether AI had been used in its production. I duly made the amendments and included the factually correct line: “No generative AI or AI-supported technologies were used at any stage of this research.” I was surprised, then, to get a reply from the editor saying an AI detection program had judged our paper to have been mainly written using AI. Even more oddly – and ironically – he referred to the paper by the title of an entirely unrelated study examining chatbots’ very limited ability to pass scientific tests.
