A reviewer facing a dense manuscript and a deadline reaches for the obvious shortcut: paste it into an AI assistant and ask for a summary. It feels harmless. It is, in fact, one of the most common ways confidentiality is broken in peer review today — and unlike most breaches, it happens silently and at scale.
Why uploading a manuscript is the problem
When you agree to review, you accept a confidentiality obligation: the manuscript is unpublished, privileged work belonging to its authors. Pasting it into a general AI service transfers that work to a third party, potentially onto servers that retain it and may use it to train future models. The authors never consented to that, and you cannot undo it. Depending on the content, it can also expose unpublished clinical data or personal information.
The rule is simple: confidential manuscript text does not leave the review system. That includes abstracts, figures, tables and supplementary files.
What AI can legitimately help with
The line falls between your own words and the authors' words:
| Generally acceptable | Not acceptable |
|---|---|
| Polishing the grammar and tone of comments you wrote yourself, provided they do not quote or describe the authors' unpublished data | Uploading the manuscript, figures or data for summary or critique |
| Asking general questions about a method, in the abstract, without manuscript text | Asking a tool to generate the review |
| Using a journal-provided tool that is contractually bound to confidentiality | Using consumer tools that may retain inputs |
The deciding questions are: does this send the authors' unpublished content anywhere, and is the judgement still mine?
Why the judgement must stay human
Peer review is an accountable expert opinion. A language model can produce a confident, well-structured critique that is subtly wrong — inventing references, missing a fatal design flaw, or objecting to something standard in the field. It cannot declare a conflict of interest, cannot be held responsible, and cannot know what it does not know. An editor weighing your recommendation is relying on your expertise; substituting a generated text misrepresents what you supplied.
Disclose what you used
If you used any AI assistance, tell the editor and say how. Undisclosed AI-written reviews are being detected — through characteristic phrasing and impossibly fast turnaround — and they damage the reviewer's standing far more than a late or short review ever would. Journals are actively developing policy here, so check the specific journal's instructions before you start.
For editors
State a policy in your reviewer instructions rather than assuming reviewers know. Make clear that manuscripts must not be uploaded to external tools, ask reviewers to disclose assistance, and be alert to reports that are fluent, generic and free of the specific detail that shows the manuscript was actually read. Our guides on reviewing well and AI in research writing cover the author-facing side.