In February, a ridiculous, AI-generated rat genital somehow made its way into an article that has since been retracted Frontiers in Cellular and Developmental Biology article. It seems that this bizarre travesty is just a louder example of an ongoing problem in scientific literature. Journals find themselves at a crossroads regarding how to deal with researchers who are using popular, but questionable, generative AI to create images or draft manuscripts. Detecting evidence of AI use isn’t always easy, but a new report from Media 404 This week’s report shows that there are dozens of articles, which appear to be partially AI-generated and published in plain view. What’s the dead giveaway? Computer generated jargon that is commonly used.
404 Media searched the AI-generated phrase “As of my last knowledge update” into Google Scholar’s public database and reportedly found 115 different articles that appeared to have relied on copy and pasted AI model outputs. That string of words are one of many turns of phrase often churned out by large language models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In this case, the “knowledge update” refers to the period when a model’s…
