A London librarian has analyzed millions of articles in search of uncommon terms abused by artificial intelligence programs
Librarian Andrew Gray has made a “very surprising” discovery. He analyzed five million scientific studies published last year and detected a sudden rise in the use of certain words, such as meticulously (up 137%), intricate (117%), commendable (83%) and meticulous (59%). The librarian from the University College London can only find one explanation for this rise: tens of thousands of researchers are using ChatGPT — or other similar Large Language Model tools with artificial intelligence — to write their studies or at least “polish” them.
There are blatant examples. A team of Chinese scientists published a study on lithium batteries on February 17. The work — published in a specialized magazine from the Elsevier publishing house — begins like this: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic: Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for….” The authors apparently asked ChatGPT for an introduction and accidentally copied it as is. A separate article in a different Elsevier journal, published by Israeli researchers on March 8, includes the text: In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.” And, a couple of months ago, three Chinese scientists published a crazy drawing of a rat with a kind of giant penis, an image generated with artificial intelligence for a study on sperm precursor cells.
In general, if it passed peer review it shouldn’t matter how it was written.
The fact the blatant examples apparently made it past peer review show how shoddy the process is though.
The academic paper system has been in trouble for decades. But man, the last 10-20 years seems to have reached such an abysmal state that even the general public is hearing about it more and more with news like this, along with the university scandals last year.
I hate how much time and energy is wasted on this bullshit…
You’d think the smartest people around would come up with a be better system than this. I mean they did, but some of the highest decision-makers have big incentives to keep things as they are. So mark that one more on the “capitalism ruins everything it touches” scoreboard.
¯\(ツ)/¯Incentives matter in any system. The incentives are perverse right now.
The editing too. I worked as an editor for academic journals and newspapers about 25 years ago, and nothing like these “blatant” examples would get anywhere near print. We’d remove clichéd language too. Everyone seems to have stopped proof reading and editing.
Good thing the cost to publish went down /s
It’s because all the management level types above the editors all got the brainwave to fire the editors and “just use AI” instead, and entirely failed to understand that the technology is in its infancy and really cannot be considered reliable for things like this, especially if it’s used in such simplistic plug-and-play fashion.
Publishers not proofreading was long before AI came into play. I’ve noticed it for at least a decade now.
There was a whole season of The Wire that was dedicated to the theme of news publications demanding that more be done with less as budgets were cut. Craigslist was a major factor in the trend as it cut revenue severely for local publications.
So, not very meticulous?
I don’t find these journals’ processes commendable.
It’s commendable that they discovered this through their meticulous research.
Incredible.
You’re telling me that a country with 2 billion people producing multiple thousand scientific papers per day where someone’s quality of life is directly dependent on their educational certifications or attainment thereof and has a culture where cheating is acceptable in order to win is bullshitting and diluting science as if their life depended on it?
Shocked, I tell you, shocked.
Speaking with some family I still have over there, to hear them tell it at least, it’s lingering generational trauma originating from the Great Leap Forward.
Doing the “right thing” at that point in China’s history got you killed. Millions died in the name of collectivization. To survive, people did what they had to: they lied, smuggled, stole, and scammed.
The honest died, the dishonest lived, and so dishonesty became enshrined as a national virtue.
Not too different from capitalism in the west I suppose, since no one good and honest becomes rich. But at least the poor aren’t dying in the millions yet, so people still accept the lie that hard work and integrity will result in success.
Why couldn’t journals require authors to disclose use of any AI tool along with specific prompts used? It shouldn’t be too hard to manage that.
what the fuck is this image? Is this new new biology?
That was another AI-related ‘mishap’:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/dy3jbz/scientific-journal-frontiers-publishes-ai-generated-rat-with-gigantic-penis-in-worrying-incident
I wonder… could I let chatGPT get me a PhD?
Just don’t let it draw any mouse anatomy
That’s why I overuse a Thesaurus
Yes I dwindle, jade, tax, crumble, impair, weather, decrease, gall, decline, tire, decay, scrape, abrade, fade, waste, shrink, deteriorate, exhaust, erode, scuff, weary, graze, fatigue, diminish, fray, chafe, drain, overwork, grind, cut down, wear out, be worthless, become threadbare, become worn, go to seed, scrape off, use up, wash away and wear my thesaurus thin too
Well, I think this points more towards the rise of LLM driven spell checkers like Grammarly than to the rise of fraud with LLMs, apart from the blatantly obvious examples that are more telling about the culture in countries like China. If they are so lazy that they just spam out u edited ChatGPT output, how many of their “findings” were just made up over the years before that? This is like stealing. Most people don’t start stealing jewelry, they start by shoplifting and become more brazen and blatant by getting away with it. So: what did those.“scientists” start out and get away with? How many studies are just lies over fabrications made up by propaganda bureaus and we didn’t even notice? How many patients got treatments stemming from those fabrications? How many studies went nowhere because they based on something that was just made up? How many things go wrong because someone wanted to make China look cool and just made up “science”?"
If they are so lazy that they just spam out u edited ChatGPT output, how many of their “findings” were just made up over the years before that?
This is the actual story here. I mean these research centers didn’t spawn into existence with the rise of AI. They’ve been publishing works for years, often decades, often with the goal to spread propaganda. Anything that either makes the CCP look good or any other nation look bad is fair game. Let’s just remember the batshit insane propaganda they kept releasing during the pandemic, mostly inside China. At some points they claimed the virus came from Italy, the US, Australia, Sweden or pretty much any country that spoke out against China at the time. They dragged ‘scientists’ in front of cameras to claim how the pandemic was imported via packages from Canada at one point. Meanwhile doctors in Wuhan who tried to warn the world in late 2019 got silenced and vanished.
Long story short, to no one’s surprise ChatGPT in research publications is just a symptom of something much worse. Papers from certain places were never trustworthy and the use of LLMs just shows how bad it has been all along.
Careful, the tankies might hear you.
While there’s no chance that other countries aren’t doing this as well, it’s always hilarious to me how blatant China and some others can be with this shit.
And how science bullshit websites gobble their bullshit up. Look at the technology communities here on Lemmy. There is not one week without some spurious claim by Chinese scientists who apparently revolutionize batteries two times a month at least, each revolution more hilariously beyond everything physically possible than the previous one.
Yet, most ppl talk about how awesome this tech will be when it’s finally in use, blabber about the genius behind the discovery and go into borderline conspiracy mode, suspecting “big oil” or whomever to stop this one like they supposedly stopped all the others. Physics is what “stopped the others”, you gullible tech-freak! Reality stopped the one before that! Big oil or pharma or whoever are by no means without guilt when it comes.to stoping innovation, but those things are just made up. It’s usually not even very thought through. It’s just obvious bullshit.
