The implications and effects of ChatGPT on academic scholarship and authorship: a death knell for original academic publications?

ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence large language model, took the world by storm in November 2022. Its launch was met with excitement, and it garnered over 1 million users within the first five days of its release, surpassing social media giants like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and even the top search engine, Google. Having been trained on volumes of data, ChatGPT has displayed the ability to produce human-like responses to questions. Concerns have been raised among members of the academic and research community regarding the ethical usage of ChatGPT and language models in education and academic/scientific research. This paper examines the development and rise of ChatGPT and similar AI tools, their pros and cons, their impact on academic research and possible intellectual property conflicts. It concludes that ChatGPT and language models are here to stay and makes recommendations for its ethical usage to prevent and detect plagiarism and protect intellectual property rights.