Artificial Intelligence (AI) is much discussed these days. Indeed, it shows great promise in all sorts of endeavors, including writing essays on many topics. For the latter, while various attempts so far have not been entirely convincing, in particular because AI tools tend to invent references and cannot create new knowledge, there is still a threat that someone could excessively leverage these tools to pretend to have done their research.
Such abuse is supposed to be discovered in the peer-review process, but readers of pre-prints (working papers, discussion papers, etc.) may be caught off guard. As pre-prints are the primary type of publication that RePEc users read, we have been looking for a solution.
We are proud to announce that RePEc is collaborating with startup PiscesAI in developing a certification tool for pre-prints. This tool leverages AI to beat it at its own game: find what is written by AI and what is not. Authors can now request their working paper to be analyzed and certified as being AI-free. To do so, they need to log in the RePEc Author Service and look for the AI certification link. Once certified, participating RePEc services display a logo on the abstract page of the paper.
As mentioned before, this tool is only available for pre-prints. However, journals that do not conduct peer review can also ask for this privilege. For this, they need to contact the administrator email on the RePEc Author Service. They will then be marked as being available to authors for this certification service.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 