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The difficulty of detecting AI-tool use in peer review is proving problematic.<\/span>Credit: BrianAJackson\/iStock via Getty<\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s almost impossible to know whether a peer-review report has been generated by artificial intelligence, according to a study that put AI-detecting tools to the test.<\/p>\n A research team based in China used the Claude 2.0 large language model (LLM), created by Anthropic, an AI company in San Francisco, California, to generate peer-review reports and other types of documentation for 20 published cancer-biology papers from the journal eLife1. The journal\u2019s publisher makes papers freely available online as \u2018reviewed preprints\u2019, and publishes them alongside their referee reports and the original unedited manuscripts.<\/p>\n The authors fed the original versions into Claude and prompted it to generate referee reports. The team then compared the AI-generated reports with the genuine ones published by eLife.<\/p>\n The AI-written reviews \u201clooked professional, but had no specific, deep feedback\u201d, says Lingxuan Zhu, an oncologist at the Southern Medical University in Lianyungang, China, and a co-author of the study. \u201cThis made us realize that there was a serious problem.\u201d<\/p>\n The study found that Claude could write plausible citation requests (suggesting papers that authors could add to their reference lists) and convincing rejection recommendations (made when reviewers think a journal should reject a submitted paper). The latter capability raises the risk of journals rejecting good papers, says Zhu. \u201cAn editor cannot be an expert in everything. If they receive a very persuasive AI-written negative review, it could easily influence their decision.\u201d<\/p>\n The study also found that the majority of the AI reports fooled the detection tools: ZeroGPT erroneously classified 60% as written by a human, and GPTzero concluded this for more than 80%.<\/p>\n A growing challenge for journals is the fact that LLMs could be used in many ways to produce a referee report. What is deemed an \u2018acceptable\u2019 use of AI also differs depending on whom you ask. In a survey of some 5,000 researchers conducted by Nature earlier this year, 66% of respondents said it wasn\u2019t appropriate to use generative AI to create reviewer reports from scratch. But 57% said it was acceptable to use it to help with peer review by getting it to answer questions about papers. <\/p>\n And although AI-detection tools are improving, they struggle to determine how much of a document has been generated using AI. An analysis published last year of referee reports that were submitted to four computer-science conferences estimated that 17% had been substantially modified by chatbots2. It\u2019s not clear, however, whether the referees used AI to improve the reports or to write them entirely. <\/p>\n Nature Index 2025 Research Leaders<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Jeroen Verharen, a neuroscientist at the firm iota Biosciences in Alameda, California, says he is surprised that the AI detectors used by Zhu and his team weren\u2019t better at spotting the AI-written referee reports. <\/p>\n But he adds that AI-written reports and associated materials are unlikely to become a widespread problem. If reviewers don\u2019t want to review, he says, \u201cthey would just say no\u201d.<\/p>\n Conversely, Miko\u0142aj Piniewski, a hydrologist at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, argues that it is a growing issue. He says he has already received referee reports that he suspects were written by AI.<\/p>\n \u201cLLMs are increasingly being used by peer reviewers, although this is rarely disclosed,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen I spoke to my colleagues in the field of hydrology, it became clear that each of us had encountered at least one such case as an author in the past two years. At least one of the review reports we received looked very suspicious, and the AI-detection tools we used flagged it as potentially generated by LLMs.\u201d<\/p>\n Piniewski adds that he is sure some journal editors are accepting AI-generated referee reports, unwittingly or otherwise. He suggests that a global shortage of peer reviewers could be causing some editors to be more lenient than they should be. \u201cI\u2019m afraid it is largely driven by convenience,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The difficulty of detecting AI-tool use in peer review is proving problematic.Credit: BrianAJackson\/iStock via Getty It\u2019s almost impossible to know whether a peer-review report has been generated by artificial intelligence, according to a study that put AI-detecting tools to the test. A research team based in China used the Claude 2.0 large language model (LLM),<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[2718,3678,2241,3859,4109],"class_list":{"0":"post-38274","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-avoid","9":"tag-created","10":"tag-detection","11":"tag-peer","12":"tag-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38274\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/38275"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Differing opinions<\/h2>\n