Credit: Amy Osborne / AFP
An infographic of a rat with a preposterously large penis. Another showing human legs with way too many bones. An introduction that starts: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic”.
These are a few of the most egregious examples of artificial intelligence that have recently made their way into scientific journals, shining a light on the wave of AI-generated text and images washing over the academic publishing industry.
Several experts who track down problems in studies told AFP that the rise of AI has turbocharged the existing problems in the multi-billion-dollar sector.
All the experts emphasised that AI programmes such as ChatGPT can be a helpful tool for writing or translating papers — if thoroughly checked and disclosed.
But that was not the case for several recent cases that somehow snuck past peer […]
What we are seeing is the confluence of a few trends. The first is the transformation of “science” from a method of inquiry to science as a career, with the products of science used as a commodity. This is a result of a stage of capitalism where everything is attempted to be transformed as a commodity. Once this inflection point is passed, the reader must be very discerning to differential the true from the false, with the line between a researcher dedicated to truth blurs into an entrepreneur selling a product. Hidden incentives of funding “research”assist the blurring of boundaries. This article clearly is an indictment of the peer review system which has become corrupted or perverted to serve the new paradigm. Chat GPT just amplifies and accelerates the process. We have become a society which is willing to tolerate high levels of fraud, and this is one example. Until we make it clear as a culture that we no longer value the fraudulent we will continue to see this trend play out.