Guillaume Cabanac Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wo…
I've heard many papers are published to never be read by humans. It only makes sense that some portion of those papers aren't written by humans either.
I wonder what the overlap is between AI assisted papers and papers with few to no readers.
One important thing is that you have potential. ChatGDP will write something alright-ish, but it's literally impossible for it to move beyond that. It doesn't have the power of creativity.
Writing is painful, but it also helps us think clearer about our work and contribution. I think it's an important part of the process of doing science, no matter which field. And one gets better at it with training.
It's interesting that you write this because the last place I worked focused on unspecializing by having almost everyone do every job.
In fact, they relocated across the country to save on building costs, and instead of hiring actual technical writers and office staff, they pushed the extra work down on their engineers because it's more profitable to bill for the engineering time.
I spent much of my job editing papers and I'm not even good at it while getting paid to do embedded design. It was weird. It was basically fraud but walking the fine line of technically legal.
I observed this happening multiple times throughout my career. Sometimes, inefficiency is the point in this case driven by capitalists and market forces.
... Did you read the article? Language tools like grammarly and deepL are in use by scientists today. Copying+pasting the output of chatGPT without ever looking at it, or even using a language tool to publish thoughts that were never in your head to begin with, is the actual concern
It's worse than that. Authors actually pay (up to several thousand dollars) to publish, the editors who find referees are doing this as a side job, so probably they're not exactly overpaid either. Finally you have the anonymous referee, who not only doesn't get paid, but they get literally zero recognition. Also, papers aren't printed in journals any more, they are online only, so there's no printing fee either, there's only just server hosting costs, paying some people for language editing and final typesetting (in many fields authors must submit LaTeX manuscripts, basically ready for publishing). And profit of course.
Yep, it’s a fucking embarrassment. Clearly science and academia stopped attracting our brightest and best a while ago or their egos are so fragile they’re as easy to manipulate as children. Either way, institutionally, very poor leaders and caretakers of institutions, which truly undermines the faith we can have in the quality of research they are doing.
That's the publishers fee, the authors typically don't get paid for their work to be published. It costs a couple grand to get your paper published and free for the general public.
@floofloof They charge €40 for access, yet one is left wondering what sort of peer review this paper has undergone when obvious signs of generative AI has slipped in. What about less obvious signs? If the "authors" had simply used the copy-to-clipboard icon in chatgpt, they would have been all good and this would never have been uncovered.
If anything, this is an argument for free public access to scientific papers. Any experts on AI could scan and detect this, even when it's more subtle.