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  • WORLD VIEW

AI chatbots are already biasing research — we must establish guidelines for their use now

The academic community has looked at how artificial-intelligence tools help researchers to write papers, but not how they distort the literature scientists choose to cite.
By
  1. Zhicheng Lin

    1. Zhicheng Lin is a metascientist and psychologist at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems are consuming vast amounts of online content yet pointing few users to the articles’ publishers. In early 2025, US-based company OpenAI collected around 250 pages of material for every visitor it directed to a publisher’s website. By mid-2025, that figure had soared to 1,500, according to Matthew Prince, chief executive of US-based Internet-security firm Cloudflare. And the extraction rate of US-based AI start-up company Anthropic climbed even higher over the same period: from 6,000 pages to 60,000. Even tech giant Google, long considered an asset to publishers because of the referral traffic it generated, tripled its ratio from 6 pages to 18 with the launch of its AI Overviews feature. The current information ecosystem is dominated by ‘answer engines’ — AI chatbots that synthesize and deliver information directly, with users trusting the answers now more than ever.

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Nature 645, 285 (2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-025-02810-5

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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