I’ve submitted a paper to a reputable journal and received two reviews asking for a revision. One of the reviews is on-topic and helpful. The other, however, I suspect was generated by an AI based on the abstract only. I don’t want to debate the decision (the second reviewer is fair), but I wonder if I should mention my suspicions to the journal editor.
Should I? I doubt I can prove the use of AI. All I have is a strong suspicion. Plus, I don’t want to hurt my article. Yet, using AI for generating (not merely styling) reviews seems like such a bad practice that maybe it’s worth letting the editor know.
My suspicions are based on several things:
First, the style is off. The review consists only of very long questions like:
In terms of the paper's stated goal of contributing to the literature, how well does it provide [contribution mentioned in abstract] for [use-case mentioned in abstract]?
There are no suggestions, no feedback, and no statements. It’s only broad questions suspiciously rephrasing each line of the abstract (and heavily re-using entire phrases from it).
Second, the list of suggested articles is strange and includes existing papers (only names) from irrelevant fields.
Third, out of curiosity, I've run the text via several online AI-detection tools, and all of them conclude it’s AI (which I am aware is not a valid proof on its own).