A peer reviewed journal with nonsense AI images was just published
A peer reviewed journal with nonsense AI images was just published
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I feel like two different problems are conflated into one though.
- The academic review process is broken.
- AI generated bullshit is going to cause all sorts of issues.
Point two can contribute to point 1 but for that a bunch of stuff needs to happen. Correct my if I am wrong but as far as my understanding of peer-review processes are supposed to go it is something along the lines of:
- A researcher submits their manuscript to a journal.
- An editor of that journal validates the paper fits within the scope and aims of the journal. It might get rejected here or it gets send out for review.
- When it does get send out for review to several experts in the field, the actual peer reviewers. These are supposed to be knowledgeable about the specific topic the paper is about. These then read the paper closely and evaluate things like methodology, results, (lack of) data, and conclusions.
- Feedback goes to the editor, who then makes a call about the paper. It either gets accepted, revisions are required or it gets rejected.
If at point 3 people don't do the things I highlighted in bold then to me it seems like it is a bit silly to make this about AI. If at point 4 the editor ignores most feedback for the peer reviewers, then it again has very little to do with AI and everything the a base process being broken.
To summarize, yes AI is going to fuck up a lot of information, it already has. But by just shouting, “AI is at it again with its antics!” at every turn instead of looking further and at other core issues we will only make things worse.
Edit:
To be clear, I am not even saying that peer reviewers or editors should "just do their job already". But fake papers have been increasingly an issue for well over a decade as far as I am aware. The way the current peer review process works simply doesn't seem to scale to where we are today. And yes, AI is not going to help with that, but it is still building upon something that already was broken before AI was used to abuse it.
But by just shouting, “AI is at it again with its antics!” at every turn instead of looking further and at other core issues we will only make things worse.
I think this is a very unfair characterization of what I and others have voiced. This has always been a fundamental issue when talking to AI-evangelists, which you may not be but your argument seems to fall in line with. There is this inherently defensive posture I find whenever a critique is levied of AI, yet if I were so protective of something like the internal combustion engine, people would (rightfully) raise eyebrows.
I agree that AI is a tool and often it is just widening cracks that exist, but we need to deal with these issues on multiple fronts and acknowledge that reckless adoption exacerbates the issue. And the new front that AI has opened up is scale. The ability for even someone with a modest, home-rolled LLM to just flood the internet with a bunch of crappy blog spam is outrageous and wasn't even a possible 5 years ago. One person can do the damage of a thousand. Run a cursory google search and see what SEO + AI blog spam has wrought.
Characterizing it as "this was already an issue it's not AI’s fault" is overly reductionist at its core. It's passing the buck and saying that AI in no way, shape, or form, bears any responsibility for the problem. That just means we aren't looking critically at what is a ultimately a tool and how it can be used for harm.
But fake papers have been increasingly an issue for well over a decade as far as I am aware.
Yes but these articles were not nearly as prolific. We are talking orders of magnitude more crap to sift through already occurring across many industries. It has never been this bad. Give the journals 1000 people and 100x the budget and eventually they will still be overcome. It's not just "fix the review process." It's a complicated issue that is exploited in multiple ways.
I feel like this is the third time people are selective reading into what I have said.
I specifically acknowledge that AI is already causing all sorts of issues. I am also saying that there is also another issue at play. One that might be exacerbated by the use of AI but at its root isn't caused by AI.
In fact, in this very thread people have pointed out that *in this case" the journal in question is simply the issue. https://beehaw.org/comment/2416937
In fact. The only people likely noticed is, ironically, the fact that AI was being used.
And again I fully agree, AI is causing massive issues already and disturbing a lot of things in destructive ways. But, that doesn't mean all bullshit out there is caused by AI. Even if AI is tangible involved.
If that still, in your view, somehow makes me sound like an defensive AI evangelist then I don't know what to tell you...
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The fact that you specifically respond to this one highly specific thing. While I clearly have written more is exactly what I mean.
shrugs
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Would you like me to quote every single one of your lines, line by line, and respond to them?
No, that's not really what I'm asking for. I'm also not looking for responses that isolate a single sentence from my longer messages and ignore the context. I'm not sure how to make my point any clearer than in my first reply to you, where I started with two bullet points. You seemed to focus on the second, but my main point was about the first. If we do want to talk about standard behavior in human conversation, generally speaking, people do acknowledge that they have heard/read something someone said even if they don't respond to it in detail.
Again, I've been agreeing that AI is causing significant problems. But in the case of this specific tweet, the real issue is with a pay to publish journal where the peer review process is failing, not AI. This key point has mostly been ignored. Even if that was not the case, if you want to have any change of trying to combat the emergence of AI I think it is pretty reasonable to question if the basic processes in place are even functioning in the first place. Where my thesis (again, if this wasn't a pay to publish journal) would be that this is likely not the case as in that entire process clearly nobody looked closely at these images. And just to be extra clear, I am not saying that AI never will be an issue, etc. But if reviewing already isn't happening at a basic level how are you ever hoping to combat AI in the first place?
When did anyone say
But by just shouting, “AI is at it again with its antics!” at every turn instead of looking further and at other core issues we will only make things worse”
The context of this tweet, saying "It’s finally happened. A peer-reviewed journal article with what appear to be nonsensical AI-generated images. This is dangerous.", does imply that. I've been responding with this in mind, which should be clear. It is this sort of thing I mean when I say selective reading when you seemingly take it as me saying that you personally said exactly that. Which is a take, but not one I'd say is reasonable if you take the whole context into account.
And in that context, I've said:
that doesn’t mean all bullshit out there is caused by AI
Which I stand by. In this particular instances, in this particular context AI isn't the issue and somewhat clickbait. Which makes most of what you argued about valid concerns. Youtube struggling, SEO + AI blog spam, etc are all very valid and concerning of AI causing havoc. But in this context of me calling a particular tweet clickbait they are also very much less relevant. If you just wanted to discuss the impact of AI in general and step away from the context of this tweet, then you should have said so.
Now, about misrepresenting arguments:
If you are reaffirming somebody else’s comment, you are generally standing behind most if not all of what they said. But nobody here is saying or doing the things you are claiming. You are tilting at windmills.
Have you looked back at your own previous comments when you wrote that? Because while have this, slightly bizarre, conversation I have gone back to mine a few times. Just to check if I actually did mess up somewhere or said things differently that I thought I did. The reason I am asking is that I have been thrown a few of these remarks from you where I could have responded with the above quote myelf. Things like "It’s passing the buck and saying that AI in no way, shape, or form, bears any responsibility for the problem."