Generative AI and peer review: Summary

Between December 2023 and the early months of 2024, I denounced a language journal in Italy, alleging that the two peer review reports for my submitted article had been produced using generative AI (ChatGPT). I pursued this matter publicly in the equal aims of establishing accountability and of raising public awareness about the new danger LLMs pose to scholarly integrity in the AI era.

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Those blog posts have been archived are no longer being updated. They are accessible here:

• “Unethical academics, AI, and peer review,” 20 December 2023 [link]
• “Updates on the AI peer review incident,” 31 January 2024, 7 February 2024, 6 April 2024 [link]
• “AI and peer review: Official journal response,” 26 February 2024 [link]‍

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Read about this incident in my case report published in the open-access, open-peer-review journal Research Integrity and Peer Review:

• Nicholas Lo Vecchio. 2025. “Personal experience with AI-generated peer reviews: A case study.” Research Integrity and Peer Review 10:4. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-025-00161-3 [link]

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Documentation‍

The following pieces of supporting evidence are available here for download:

• Original copy of the peer review reports
• Author-annotated copy of the peer review reports
• ChatGPT simulations (synthesis document used as corpus for concordances)
• ChatGPT simulations raw output
• Concordances of ChatGPT simulations and peer review reports via Sketch Engine‍
• mediAzioni journal official response of 22 February 2024

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Author position on the LLM output in the above documentation: I oppose engaging with machine-generated content unsituated with respect to any individual human taking responsibility for it. I reject all of the ChatGPT recommendations in the documents linked as they are merely text sequences statistically reproducing normative text patterns in the corpus. I provide this documentation merely as concrete comparisons to contextualize the peer review reports I received.

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Nicholas Lo Vecchio‍

9 January 2025