Well, it’s official — AI is ruining everything. That’s not exactly news, but learning that LLMs are apparently being used to write scientific papers is a bit alarming, and Andrew Gray, a librarian at University College London, has the receipts. He looked at a cross-section of scholarly papers from 2023 in search of certain words known to show up more often in LLM-generated text, like “commendable”, “intricate”, or “meticulous”. Most of the words seem to have a generally positive tone and feel a little fancier than everyday speech; one rarely uses “lucidly” or “noteworthy” unless you’re trying to sound smart, after all. He found increases in the frequency of appearance of these and other keywords in 2023 compared to 2022, when ChatGPT wasn’t widely available.
It doesn’t always take a statistical analysis of word distributions to detect the footprints of an LLM, though. The article includes examples of text copied and pasted directly from the chatbot, without any attempt at editing or even basic proofreading. How not only the authors of the papers but also the journal editors and reviewers managed not to pick up an obvious chatbot error message that had been copy-pasted is hard to imagine. And let’s not even get started on the Midjourney-generated diagram of a monstrously well-endowed rat that was used to illustrate an article (since retracted) on spermatogenesis, complete with nonsensical captions and callouts to non-existent body parts. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Speaking of nice things, did you know that the largest manufacturer of vintage lamps in history is a little company called “Underwriter’s Laboratory”? At least it seems that wa ..
Support the originator by clicking the read the rest link below.
