10mo ago

Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies

english.elpais.com Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies

A London librarian has analyzed millions of articles in search of uncommon terms abused by artificial intelligence programs

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.

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10mo ago

Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies

english.elpais.com /science-tech/2024-04-25/excessive-use-of-words-like-commendable-and-meticulous-suggest-chatgpt-has-been-used-in-thousands-of-scientific-studies.html

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10mo ago

Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies

english.elpais.com /science-tech/2024-04-25/excessive-use-of-words-like-commendable-and-meticulous-suggest-chatgpt-has-been-used-in-thousands-of-scientific-studies.html

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BecomeMe @sh.itjust.works

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10mo ago

Excessive use of words like ‘commendable’ and ‘meticulous’ suggests ChatGPT has been used in thousands of scientific studies

english.elpais.com /science-tech/2024-04-25/excessive-use-of-words-like-commendable-and-meticulous-suggest-chatgpt-has-been-used-in-thousands-of-scientific-studies.html

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44 comments

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 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.
  
  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.
  
  Good thing the cost to publish went down /s
- 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)/¯
- So, not very meticulous?
  
  I don't find these journals' processes commendable.
- It's not the reviewer's fault! When they asked ChatGPT to peer review the paper it found nothing wrong.
- Things are very people specific as to what gets through some Journals are known to have lax review but high publication costs. These "predatory" journals and other nepotism stuff has been an issue for a while. The scientific community wants to tackle these issues but it's been hard to make any real progress. Covid politics and now AI have really not helped.

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.
- It’s sadly something that happens anywhere you get incentives and pressure to cheat, https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184289296/harvard-professor-dishonesty-francesca-gino

It's commendable that they discovered this through their meticulous research.

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
  
  Honestly, the worst part isn't that its penis is so gigantic, it's that the labels are nonsense. An image like that is already not perfectly to scale out anything, so something being exaggerated can be weird but isn't necessarily a deal breaker (albeit that one is pretty darn weird)
  
  That's hilarious
  
  of course. Wouldn't be an article about AI without funny images made by AI.
- you ever seen rat balls? they are huge.
  
  i have not seen rat balls, but i'm going to assume they don't look like the spire from fucking city 17

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.
- Academic fraud is in no way a thing that is limited or even disproportionately prevalent in China. Perhaps the flavors of it are biased to one form or another in different cultures, but don't mistake that for more or less fraud in that culture. Perhaps you notice more from China simply because there are simply more Chinese people in the world than any other nation behind Indian people in India.

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

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.
- Do you think every paper writer would comply? Do you think that the actually problematic writers, like those cutting so many corners that they directly paste ChatGPT results into their paper, would comply?

Fuck that website and that insane cookie confirm box.

I don't understand? Do they look for outrage from people that don't understand what the tools does?

So what? As long as reasonable people are doing the actual science, who cares who writes the scientific legalese?
- There are is no money in actual science so reasonable people aren't doing actual science. They are doing trendy science.
- Because when your scientific legalese is confidently wrong and then someone else tries to reference your paper for their research then you've just thrown an entire branch of science under the bus from faulty assumptions. And nobody knows what assumptions are faulty unless they start all over from the beginning.
  
  Isn't this what peer review is supposed to help prevent

44 comments