It’s SEO all over again, but worse.
Caveat: not all of academia seems to be that rotten. The evidence found on arxiv.org is mainly, if not only, in the field of AI research itself 🤡
You can try it yourself, just type the following in googles search box:
allintext: “IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS” site:arxiv.org
A little preview:
Last year the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology drew media attention over the inclusion of an AI-generated image depicting a rat sitting upright with an unfeasibly large penis and too many testicles.
I must admit that made me laugh a little.
Rat (glad that was labelled) appears to have inbuilt zipper for accessing organs - not actually necessary to access his fourth testical tho, that one perches at the edge of his ball-pouch. I like the one label that just says ‘dck’.
Yep everything seems in order here. Thanks AI.
dck
too many testicles.
That’s just like… your opinion, man.
Even the scientists are fudging the truth. We’re all fucked now.
Well the ones using AI to do the reviews for them are actually at fault here
Yep. At that point, why even bother taking the review? You’re not forced to do reviews. Never taking any is likely to negatively impact your career, but still… just decline the review if you’re going to use a LLM for it anyway. Have some dignity.
The era (1990-2019) before humanity’s recent right-wing shift may have been the pinnacle of what we humans were capable of ever becoming; in terms of collective unity, welfare, global coherence, and scientific progress. Now it feels like we’re snapping back, like a rubber band stretched too far. I’m sure we’ll never reach that height again.
“…the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.”
academic fraud has always existed
Andrew German wrote about this. From his blog post I got the impression that this issue is mostly impacting compsci. Maybe it’s more widespread than that field, but my experience with compsci research is that a lot more emphasis is placed on conferences compared to journals and the general vibe I got from working with compsci folks was that volume mattered a lot more than quality when it came to publication. So maybe those quirks of the field left them more vulnerable to ai slop in the review process.
