Of course, everyone uses ChatGPT and it makes many tasks easier and faster. Especially, if you are (like me) not a native speaker of English, ChatGPT is a great tool to improve a text. Yesterday, I stumbled upon this tweet reporting that someone probably used ChatGPT to write the discussion section of a paper but copied the “regenerate response” part:

I think it is absolutely a good idea to use a tool like ChatGPT to improve one’s English. And it is clearly less embarrassing for the authors than for the publisher as it tells a lot about their (poor) peer review system which, in this case as we are dealing with a MDPI publication, has been criticized a lot.

A quick search on Google Scholar for recent papers using this exact phrase without being explicity about ChatGPT reveals that there are actually several papers in which the authors forgot to delete the phrase “regenerate response” at the end of a paragraph. Interestingly, they all seem to come from predatory journals. One of these papers even included the phrase in the middle of the references and – you can guess it: The references are non-existent suggesting that they were generated by ChatGPT.

So, in general, nothing speaks against checking your grammar using ChatGPT, but don’t forget to remove the “regenerate response” if you accidentaly copy it. And don’t fake references (or anything else). In the end, while the flood of fake papers might increase with ChatGPT, I strongly believe that this tool has many advantages making our lives easier.