The editorial board of the palaeoanthropological journal Journal of Human Evolution has resigned over the publisher's imposition of artificial intelligence tools, which increased neither the efficiency nor the quality of the work, but…
In particular, it is reported that when, in the autumn of 2023, an AI-based machine assistant was brought in to edit texts, it began replacing the capital letters in proper names with lower-case ones and altering the typefaces specially used to set off terms and scientific nomenclature. As a result, the publication of approved articles had to be halted and the articles edited all over again after the AI's intervention.
Yet despite the problems it created and the complaints of the editors, the publisher went on using the AI assistant, which substantially lowered the quality of the editing and even changed the meaning of the articles it processed. The editorial board unexpectedly resigned. The publisher is now busy asking the AI assistant what to do next.
The article is entertaining, and the case is both funny and instructive, but the question naturally arises: could the publisher really not have hired a proper prompt engineer to tune the clever little machine so that it would at least stop replacing the right with the wrong, or was it all, as usual, stolen before…
