Dear HIFA colleagues,
To what extent should articficial intelligence (AI) be used in the research, publishing and editing process?
Extracts below from a Scholarly Kitchen blog and a comment from me. Full text: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/03/09/guest-post-the-perils-of-...
"In our opinion, the use of GenAI for research is highly problematic for many reasons. First, GenAI hallucinates, i.e., it creates outputs that may seem plausible yet are manifestly and materially inaccurate. Second, GenAI is trained with data that is inherently biased, notably internet-derived sources. Thirdly, reliance on GenAI may lead to what we call scholarly deskilling, or the progressive inability to undertake such tasks as writing a research paper without GenAI’s help. GenAI may also influence the essential intellectual contributions (ideas, creativity) central to a paper that we might otherwise imagine to be the sole preserve of human beings. Fourthly, in our own experience, we realized that many scholars (especially junior scholars) currently using GenAI are either unaware of or complacent about these issues, and, more importantly, not all are aware of how these systems actually operate. One consequence of these problems is a torrent of GenAI-themed and influenced research that is minimally valuable to society...
"Even in our own community (information systems), we are aware of journal editors with diametrically opposed principles, some encouraging all forms of GenAI use, others forbidding it for all intellectual tasks in equal measure."
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org