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"The prolific chemist, who has published a study every 37 hours this year..." I found this part quite impressive until I read the following part: "Luque is co
by Alifatisk 4y ago
"The prolific chemist, who has published a study every 37 hours this year..."
I found this part quite impressive until I read the following part:
"Luque is constantly publishing papers. Last year he authored some 110 articles. So far this year he has published 58. The chemist admitted that since December, he has been using the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to “polish” his texts. “These months have been quite productive, because there are articles that used to require two or three days and now I do them in one day,” he said."
Even if this is unrelated to the actual story, I find it a tiny bit disturbing. Is this the new standard practice? Let some robot spew out paragraphs of text to convey the scientist research?
- malka 4y agomost papers are made of 90% of useless fluff, and 10% of meat.
- CodexArcana 4y agoIf the domain expert is there to audit the results, where is the issue?
- greenthrow 4y agoYou're assuming they are going to do as thorough of a job auditing as they'd do on their own writing. I doubt that's what will happen when the point of the AI is to spew content out faster.
- i_am_jl 4y agoI can't tell whether this is a question from someone who didn't read the article, or whether this is the most meta comment I've ever read.
- belter 4y agoIt could be both at the same time :-)
- trabant00 4y agoThat sounds like gaming the system. I have a very hard time imagining somebody can produce quality work every 37 hours non-stop.
- btilly 4y agoWell, work of SOME type of quality, perhaps. The most prolific mathematician in history, Paul Erdős, published about 1500 papers over about 60 years. That comes out to a little more than 2 a month. That's close to an upper bound on what should be possible without some form of cheating.
- brigadier132 4y agoIt depends on how he is using it. If he is using it to insert new content into his papers it is concerning. If he is using it to reword his papers but the content remains the same it's less concerning.
- suddenclarity 4y agoIt seems to be more than that: > Magazinov mentioned that a non-existent “vegetative electron microscopy” appears in two studies by Luque published with Iranian colleagues.
- cwmoore 4y agoIs it unreasonable to surmise that vegetative electrons are very small, thus the microscopy?
- akiselev 4y agoThe decision to turn off life support for vegetative electrons was made at the first Solvay Conference in 1911, at which point they ceased to exist in our universe in a total wave function collapse. ChatGPT has apparently overfitted on late 19th century theoretical physics journals.
- antonvs 4y agoBut there’s speculation that vegetative electrons may still exist in the brains of the people who have been peer reviewing these papers.
- belter 4y agoWell there are Electron Microscope studies of the vegetative Cellular Life, so that is not the knife he will fall on...
- KurtMueller 4y ago| If he is using it to reword his papers but the content remains the same it's less concerning. How is that less concerning? Rewording conclusions or the abstract, even subtly, can change the meaning of those words and of those sections.
- AraceliHarker 4y agoIf you read the whole article, that's not because Rafael Luque was using ChatGPT to churn out papers, but because he was lending his name to research papers done in Saudi Arabia and Chinese universities.
- Alifatisk 4y agoI am aware of that and did not state otherwise, I just had to point it out. I even said "even if this is unrelated to the story"...
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> that's not because Rafael Luque was using ChatGPT to churn out papers, but because he was lending his name to research papers done in Saudi Arabia and Chinese universities ...who were using even worse models to churn out papers about "vegetative electron microscopy."
- catchnear4321 4y ago> Without me, the University of Córdoba will drop 300 places in the Shanghai ranking. They have shot themselves in the foot While that was the issue that the university took with him, the extra logos on his lab coat, why does the university care about him? Why is he valuable? Numbers. He boosts numbers with bullshit. Numbers that are misinterpreted to indicate value. And he’s gotten good at bullshit. He’s even incorporated ChatGPT into his workflow. So good at it that entities paid him to try and sneak some extra logos on his lab coat. He’s smart. He likely found ways to never accept money and yet fully utilize it for his benefit. This all matters. The system is fractally broken.
- pvaldes 4y agoAn equivalent would be to claim that you work for Apple when you have a full time contract with Microsoft. On the other hand this game has been played before. Everybody knows in Spanish speaking science that just adding one researcher from the Anglosphere with a nice English name to the list of authors is a seal of approval for many journals, and will open a lot of doors even if the researcher just agreed to sign on the paper.
- belter 4y agoMostly is publishing by being co-author: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4190-1916 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4190-1916
- outside1234 4y agoI'm doing this too on a paragraph level. It is amazing how much better my writing is getting with a tutor. It is entirely unsurprising that a non-native writer would do this. It would be more surprising in five years that anyone is not doing this.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoProlificness aside, what has he actually done? Is he advancing chemistry or just co-signing dubious papers?
- kevviiinn 4y agoCo-signing dubious papers
- simplotek 4y agoFrom the article, this corruption scheme goes way beyond cosigning papers. The main selling point of this corruption scheme was gaming institutional metrics. From the article, the Spanish researcher gamed publication metrics by co-signing huge volumes of research papers, and proceeded to sell his affiliation to the highest bidder as it allowed low-tier institutions to game rankings and bump up their standing. There's also another angle to his scheme, as his threat to the university of Cordoba consisted of "you har my interests and your university will drop in rankings".
- colechristensen 4y agoSeems like he was gaming the various academic ratings systems by getting lots of things published with his name on them.
- cornholio 4y agoIt speaks to the broken state of measuring scientific and academic output. It's 99% a charade, people churning out machine generated papers nobody reads but get quoted in an attempt to justify the inflated claims of other machine generated garbage papers, in a circular attempt to fudge the stats that decide the funding and promotion. The idea that someone can even read, edit and make co-author level contributions in papers aimed for a top-level journals, all in the span of 37 hours, is utterly ridiculous. It's basically the equivalent of SEO spamming the Page rank algorithm with crummy pages with many back-links and repeated search terms. The search optimized term here is the author's name.
- cwmoore 4y agoWhy maximize paperclips when terms like "vegetative electron microscopy" could be trending in the literature.
- DoctorOetker 4y agoFor those who didn't read the article, or for those who did, but didn't follow its link to the PubPeer thread containing the "vegetative electron microscopy" observation: https://pubpeer.com/publications/7C9F0CCD493B1129135A3A918B0AAB# https://pubpeer.com/publications/7C9F0CCD493B1129135A3A918B0... Search the page for the term and you'll see the relevant comment. The term seems to stem from an OCR cluster-mishap, where a valid scientific document was once OCR'ed incorrectly. The page has 2 columns of text and the left column has a running sentence 'ending' with "vegetative" before continuing on the next line in the same column. But at the same height in the column on the right a sentence continues, visually starting with "electron microscopy". The term is entirely meaningless in the field. This isn't just "using a little ChatGPT to brush up my English" at all. Other comments point out that the contents of abstract and article don't even match, the abstract being about bacteria but the article contents about gene delivery... I don't need convincing that ML will have tremendous positive impact in math and science disciplines, it's obvious, but the way ML was used in this case is not a defensible usage.
- roundandround 4y ago
- nerdponx 4y agoThis person is already writing an article in 2-3 days. Is ChatGPT realy the problem, for reducing the time to 1 day?
- freedomben 4y agoI think you have a good point, but you're probably getting downvoted because on first read it came off more as you were defending the use of chatgpt (rather than criticizing the absurdly fast output). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you're pointing out the absurdity of publishing every 2 to 3 days and implying that it was already essentiallly garbage he was producing, and chatgpt was just polishing the garbage (which IMHO, as you stated, the garbage production is clearly the bigger problem, not the polishing).
- nerdponx 4y ago> you're pointing out the absurdity of publishing every 2 to 3 days and implying that it was already essentiallly garbage he was producing Yes, exactly.
- marcosdumay 4y agoI'll go one step further than the sibling. For every possible occupation, if chatGPT can improve your odds of success (except maybe for writing fiction, but I'd guess it's bad at this too), then there is something fundamentally wrong with that occupation.
- lazyasciiart 4y agoThis is nonsense. You might as well say "if literacy can improve your odds of success, then there is something fundamentally wrong with that occupation".
- anigbrowl 4y agoI found this part quite impressive until I read the following part: If that first stat didn't pin your bullshit detectors into the red, you need new bullshit detectors.
- geoelectric 4y agoGPT is pretty reliable at taking an existing body of text that fits entirely in a prompt and doing something with it--reword, translate, answer questions about it, so forth. Even expanding an outline into written sentences usually works great as long as the outline has all the detail. It's really only when you let it introduce "facts" based on its body of training that it'll start going off the rails. If he's just running text through without checking the final results, that's really not wise, but the LLM is unlikely to start introducing novel facts or changing figures in response to a conservative request based entirely on the prompt text. Using it as a writing aid the way he claims he is (not that I necessarily believe all his claims) is probably one of the more responsibles way to use GPT, honestly, because you have full opportunity and ability to vet the output. Hack together something that has all the right content, then make it readable with the AI engine the way you might with a human editor collaborating, while jointly making sure the editor doesn't change the actual facts of the content. Whether or not he could be hacking anything of value together every 37 hours is another story.
- simplotek 4y ago> Even if this is unrelated to the actual story, I find it a tiny bit disturbing. Is this the new standard practice? Let some robot spew out paragraphs of text to convey the scientist research? I wouldn't be surprised if that statement wasn't a bold face lie, and Raphael Luque was just stapling his name to papers and proceeded with a clickfarm-like business model, where he sells the impact that his publication metrics has on institutions who request his services. The defiant tone in his reply is evocative of other corruption cases where the criminal is so confident in his clever scheme that he even taunts defiantly everyone to challenge it. Even the old "I don't have a cent in my bank account" bullshit excuse is as old as time. Next he might just say that he only has good, generous friends who give him some presents from time to time.