Not every use of digital tools or software applications in relation to scholarly writing and publishing falls under the term artificial intelligence as defined in the BerlinUP guideline. For example, the use of tools as aids does not necessarily require explicit mention.

Tools that use AI to check formal criteria (e.g. checking spelling, grammar and style, reference management programs and translation tools) are referred to as aids. However, these tools are not permitted to generate or create content themselves, but only to make formal changes. This does not affect the authors' responsibility for the formal and content-related correctness of the content published under their name.

According to the BerlinUP guideline, AI tools are therefore generative models for creating new content in the form of text, images, audio, video, software code or data sets. Currently known examples include text-generating chatbots such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini or LLaMA as well as image-generating AI tools such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion or Midjourney.