arXiv:2603.22510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models such as ChatGPT have increased scholarly output, but whether this productivity boost produces genuine intellectual advancement remains untested. I address this gap by measuring the semantic novelty of 13,847 articles published between 2020 and 2025 in 44 Information Systems journals. Using SPECTER2 embeddings, I operationalize novelty as the cosine distance between each paper and its nearest prior neighbors. A difference-in-differences design with the November 2022 release of ChatGPT as the treatment break reveals a heterogeneous pattern: authors affiliated with institutions in non-English-dominant countries show a 0.18 standard deviation decline in relative novelty compared to authors in English-dominant countries (beta = -0.176, p