The generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is a category of AI technology which may be used to produce various types of content, including text, images, audio, video, 3D models, simulations and synthetic data. Although it has been present for some time, in the recent months it has been popularised owing to the text and image GenAI tools, such as ChatGPT, Google Bard, LaMDA, BlenderBot, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, some of which already have new and upgraded versions.

The main issue for the scholarly research and publications relates to the fact that owing to the technology breakthrough the AI tools based on machine learning models, usually fed with large volume of data, no longer assist researchers only in recognising patterns and predicting, but also in generating the content. Questions arise such as: On a general level, is it acceptable to use the generated content in the academic publications? Is use of such tools for research and in publications contrary to academic honesty? Is researcher violating other person’s intellectual property right when using these tools?

This paper attempts to answer these questions with the aim of suggesting whether and to what extent there is a need for GenAI to be regulated at the academic institutions or wider. The paper is also aimed at investigating the models for such regulation as there are already some attempts to do so at various academic institutions in the world and many such processes are ongoing.