AI systems are actually being used to exploit non-anglophone scholars by stealing their intellectual property.

Many academic publishers collaborate with large, private editing firms to provide “author services”, which include English language editing. The arrival of AI has triggered a frantic race to the bottom among such firms, which immediately spotted a way to monetise two resources they had in abundance: research papers uploaded in digital formats and well-trained editors. Client papers could be used to train specialised AI large language models (LLMs) to recognise and correct the characteristic mistakes made by non-anglophone authors from all parts of the world. Editors could help the system learn by proofreading the automatically generated text and providing feedback for optimisation.

One company bought a small AI firm off the shelf; others hired AI engineers. Since 2020, most have built LLMs and are now selling stand-alone AI editing tools “trained on millions of research manuscripts […] enhanced by professionals at [company name]”, to quote from one promotional blurb.

…Like all LLMs, editing-company systems encode everything, not just editorial corrections. As soon as a researcher uploads a manuscript, their intellectual property – original ideas, innovative variations on established theories, newly coined terms – is appropriated by the company and will be used, likely in perpetuity, to “predict” and generate text in similar papers edited by the service (or anyone using company-provided editing tools).

Read more:
Blackwell, A. & Swenson-Wright, Z. (2024, January 12). Editing companies are stealing unpublished research to train their AI. Times Higher Education. https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/editing-companies-are-stealing-unpublished-research-train-their-ai