AI tools like ChatGPT have posed serious threats to research ethics and scholarly honesty. This article is an attempt to explore this potential threat to the sanctity, originality and integrity of research, especially research in social sciences. ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that can generate human-like texts instantly with stunning accuracy and wisdom in response to prompts and is capable of having cognitive conversations from scholarly perspectives. Governments around the world need to take punitive actions against the abuses of such AI tools in research.