AI Guidelines

AI policy for Ethnobiology Letters

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools offer opportunities for all researchers, ethnobiologists included. AI tools are also often trained on uncompensated creative output, managed by underpaid human labor, and use tremendous environmental resources . The output often mischaracterizes ethnobiological findings in important ways. To address the use of AI in the Society of Ethnobiology publications as it may relate to research design, data collection, data analysis, writing, or drawing conclusions, we offer the following guidance.

The Society of Ethnobiology discourages Authors from using AI tools when writing manuscripts. The use of AI tools for data analysis may sometimes be appropriate -though error-prone - as with machine learning applied to a large dataset. At other times, the use of AI tools for analysis may be inappropriate, as when it would misrepresent the research, violate the confidentiality of an interview, or betray the trust of an interlocutor who never consented to its use upon their contributions. Any and all use of AI for any stage of research design, data collection, analysis, and writing, including using AI tools embedded in software packages like GIS, AI used for translation, and AI used for statistical modeling must be disclosed in full to readers, editors, and reviewers. AI may be useful for image-generation in some cases, as with conceptual diagrams, but editors and reviewers have full discretion to reject papers based on images that mislead readers or misrepresent an aspect of the data collected and analyzed (e.g., a photorealistic artificial image that functions as photographic evidence - a deepfake). AI disclosure should be part of the methods or acknowledgement sections. It should include the full name and version of the tool used, how and why it was used. Authors are ultimately responsible for ensuring that their writing, data, and analysis contains no plagiarized, incorrect, or mischaracterized information.

Reviewers and Editors will forego the use of AI tools for generating content or for creating summaries of the uploaded text, as the uploading of submitted materials could breach the confidentiality of the peer review process and may infringe on the copyright, confidentiality agreements, or intellectual property of the authors. Reviewers and editors may use AI tools in a highly limited capacity in the form of plagiarism detection software, translation software, and reference checking software.