“Did you use AI?”

In his Scholarly Kitchen article Damned if you do, damned if you don’t: Multilingual researchers’ use of AI in academic writing, Avi Staiman argues that “’Did you use AI?’ is a nearly useless question.” Magically AI offered a solution to the problem — described recently in a comment by rrherch as “The language of science is broken English” — of non-English-speaking researchers writing their academic papers for publication in English language journals, only for the world of publishing to snatch the remedy away with its blanket objection to any kind of AI use. It’s a bit like being asked “When did you stop beating your wife?” Guilt is assumed — in this case simply because the author is a foreigner. Used to be editors could spot ’em by the fractured English, now they can spot them by the English being too good (in that inflated AI way)! Mr Staiman urges that “Publishers should spend less energy trying to infer AI use from vocabulary or prose style, and more energy explaining which uses…