this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
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Science Memes

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Name & shame. :) (mander.xyz)
submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 155 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Hold up. That actually got through to publishing??

[–] [email protected] 110 points 6 months ago (1 children)

It's because nobody was there to highlight the text for them.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The entire abstract is AI. Even without the explicit mention in one sentence, the rest of the text should've been rejected as nonspecific nonsense.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That's not actually the abstract; it's a piece from the discussion that someone pasted nicely with the first page in order to name and shame the authors. I looked at it in depth when I saw this circulate a little while ago.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 months ago

Ah, that makes more sense. I looked up the original abstract and indeed it looks more like what you'd expect (hard to comprehend for someone that's not in the field).

Though to clarify (for others reading this) they still did use generative AI to (help?) write the paper, which is only part of why it was withdrawn.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Maybe a big red circle around the entire abstract would have helped

[–] [email protected] 42 points 6 months ago

It's Elsevier, so this probably isn't even the lowest quality article they've published

[–] [email protected] 28 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

yea lol

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1930043324004096

I've recently been watching a lot of videos on prominent cases of fraud and malpractice like Francesca Gino, Claudine Gay, Hwang Woo-suk, etc., which prompted me to start reading more into meta-research as well, and now I'm basically paranoid about every paper I read. There's so much shady shit going on...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Yep. And AI will totally help.

Ooh I mean not help. It’ll make it much worse. Particularly with the social sciences. Which were already pretty fuX0r3d anyway due to the whole “your emotions equal this number” thing.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Many journals are absolute garbage that will accept anything. Keep that in mind the next time someone links a study to prove a point. You have to actually read the thing and judge the methodology to know if their conclusions have any merits.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Full disclosure: I don’t intend to be condescending.

Research Methods during my graduate studies forever changed the way I interpret just about any claim, fact, or statement. I’m obnoxiously skeptical and probably cynical, to be honest. It annoys the hell out of my wife but it beats buying into sensationalist headlines and miracle research. Then you get into the real world and see how data gets massaged and thrown around haphazardly…believe very little of what you see.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

I have this problem too. My wife gets so annoyed at things because I question things I notice as biases or statistical irregularities instead of just accepting that they knee what they were doing. I have tried to explain it to her. Skepticism is not dismissal and it is not saying I am smarter than them, it is recognizing that they are human and that I may be more proficient in one spot they made a mistake than they were.

I will acknowledge that the lay need to stop trying to argue with scientists because "they did their own research", but the actually informed and educated need to do a better job of calling each other out.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

A good tactic, though not perfect, is to look at the journal impact factor.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We are in top dystopia mode right now. Students have AI write articles that are proofread and edited by AI, submitted to automated systems that are AI vetted for publishing, then posted to platforms where no one ever reads the articles posted but AI is used to scrape them to find answers or train all the other AIs.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

How generative AI is clouding the future of Google search

The search giant doesn’t just face new competition from ChatGPT and other upstarts. It also has to keep AI-powered SEO from damaging its results.

More or less the same phenomenon of signal pollution:

“Google is shifting its responsibility for maintaining the quality of results to moderators on Reddit, which is dangerous,” says Ray of Amsive. Search for “kidney stone pain” and you’ll see Quora and Reddit ranking in the top three positions alongside sites like the Mayo Clinic and the National Kidney Foundation. Quora and Reddit use community moderators to manually remove link spam. But with Reddit’s traffic growing exponentially, is a human line of defense sustainable against a generative AI bot army?

We'll end up using year 2022 as a threshold for reference criteria. Maybe not entirely blocked, but like a ratio... you must have 90% pre-2022 and 10% post-2022.

Perhaps this will spur some culture shift to publish all the data, all the notes, everything - which will be great to train more AI on. Or we'll get to some type of anti-AI or anti-crawler medium.