The Curious Case Of ChatGPT And Machine Learning

Whether you’re a fan of irony or not, this news will definitely be interesting for you! The International Conference on Machine Learning banned the use of machine learning tools for paper submissions for the conference. The rule read as “papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.”

Of course, this received criticism from many. Sebastian Bubeck (Lead the ML Foundations team at Microsoft Research) tweeted, “ChatGPT and variants are part of the future. Banning is definitely not the answer.”

Yann LeCun, the Chief AI Scientist at Meta tweeted, “So medium and small-scale language models are fine, right?” He added, “I’m just asking because you know… spell checkers and predictive keyboards are language models.”

A tweet from Ethan Perez (Researcher at Anthropic AI) read “This rule disproportionately impacts my collaborators who are not native English speakers.”
   
Soon after, the ICML clarified its policy on LLMs and said that they appreciated the feedback and and would like to clarify further their intention.

Their statement included, “The Large Language Model (LLM) policy for ICML 2023 prohibits text produced entirely by LLMs (i.e., “generated”). This does not prohibit authors from using LLMs for editing or polishing author-written text. The LLM policy is largely predicated on the principle of being conservative with respect to guarding against potential issues of using LLMs, including plagiarism. The LLM policy applies to ICML 2023. We expect this policy may evolve in future conferences as we understand LLMs and their impacts on scientific publishing better.”
   
ChatGPT and other LLMs will surely affect many industries and professions. What's your take on it being used completely or partially to draft research papers? Let us know in the comments below!