The first of three themes for next year’s World Conference on Research Integrity will be the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for research integrity. In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.

The call for abstracts for the conference, set for May in Vancouver, closed a month ago. Last week, peer reviewers received an email with “URGENT” in the subject line.

“If you haven’t already reviewed the 9th WCRI abstracts that have been allocated to you, please take note of the following,” the email read. “We’ve received several signals that an unusually large proportion of the abstracts are completely off-topic and might have been written by some form of generative AI.”

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As in past years with plagiarized abstracts, almost all of those flagged this year were submitted by authors who also applied for travel grants, the email to reviewers stated.

“Consequently, we intend to further examine abstracts with AI scores exceeding 20% that will likely be accepted based on average review scores and are associated with travel grant applications,” Bouter said. “We will subsequently reject the abstracts (and the travel grant application) for which we believe that unacceptable GAI use has occurred.”

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