Letter to editor: NLP systems such as ChatGPT cannot be listed as an author because these cannot fulfill widely adopted authorship criteria.

This letter to the editor suggests adding a technical point to the new editorial policy expounded by Hosseini et al. on the mandatory disclosure of any use of natural language processing (NLP) systems, or generative AI, in writing scholarly publications. Such AI systems should naturally also be forbidden from being named as authors, because they would not have fulfilled prevailing authorship guidelines (such as the widely adopted ICMJE authorship criteria).