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Scientists aghast at AI rat with genitals in peer-reviewed article
- jsheard 3y agoTo the AIs credit it did successfully label the rat as "rat". Shame about everything else, but small victories.
- theogravity 3y agoWill the people that did the peer reviews be sanctioned in any way? Seems so blatant that it doesn't look like it was actually reviewed at all.
- jperoutek 3y agoTo me, this is the real question. One of the purposes of the peer-review is to validate and verify results, which was clearly not done to a great extent here. Perhaps the reviewers were also using some type of AI?
- hermitcrab 3y agoPerhaps the reviewer was an AI. Which gives a new spin to 'peer review'.
- dexzod 3y agomakes sense, because the peer of AI can only be AI
- favorited 3y agoThe reviewers are cited as part of the publication: Binsila B. Krishnan, National Institute of Animal Nutrition and Physiology (ICAR), India Jingbo Dai, Northwestern Medicine, United States
- hermitcrab 3y agoFrom a quick Google, they appear to be real people.
- gs17 3y agoFrontiers has an explicit rule against that, although I doubt any reviewer would admit to it.
- hermitcrab 3y agoPerhaps the author(s) were reprising Alan Sokal's seminal work?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
- userbinator 3y agoThat and possibly https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/ https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/archive/scigen/
- jackcosgrove 3y agoWhether hoax or laziness, you have to pretty ballsy to submit that article with your name on it.
- hermitcrab 3y agoAssuming those are real people's names.
- hermitcrab 3y agoIf so, I salute them. Exposing sloppiness and malpractise is a noble pursuit. I had my own bit of fun and 15 minutes of fame with software 'awards': https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-awards-scam/ https://successfulsoftware.net/2007/08/16/the-software-award...
- hermitcrab 3y agoI like the comment beneath the article: "I'm mentally tormented by the fact that the rat is casting his gaze upwards, to heights not even revealed in the image."
- quantified 3y agoProbably up to the pecker's tip. Geometrically correct if not anatomically so.
- noobermin 3y agoOne of the things that worry me the most about AI is that it enables some of the most sloppiest and laziest operators to become even more sloppy and lazy.
- sva_ 3y agoThe future is probably mediocre. Things that are "good enough" replace real craftsmanship.
- hermitcrab 3y agoHence the washing machine that dies 1 week after the warranty expires. Yay for capitalism!
- jay_kyburz 3y agoI imagine its quite difficult to get a washing machine to die as close as possible to the end of the warranty, but not before it. Just one week must take some real skill.
- hermitcrab 3y agoPrecision enshittification. You'll soon be able to do a masters degree in it.
- blooalien 3y ago> "Precision enshittification. You'll soon be able to do a masters degree in it." Only until someone trains an "AI" model to do it automatically... ;~)
- brnt 3y agoI suppose manufacturing washing machines that reliably give up the ghost months within warranty expiry is its own kind of impressive.
- zroaguai8281 3y agoThe journal in which it appeared is a predatory journal with a good PR department. I hope this is the last nail in their coffin. If you see something published in a "Frontiers In" it's most likely rubbish. Only god knows what kind of peer review the article went through (if any), in the most optimistic case it was reviewed indeed by peers of the people who submitted an obvious AI generated article, probably they sre already thinking of submitting their own.
- userbinator 3y agoFrontiers In, more like Frontier Sin?
- amyjess 3y agoI saw the picture get posted on social media earlier today, and I took one look at it and thought "this looks like something from the Cursed AI Facebook group I'm in" before I read the post accompanying it and saw them saying it was published in a peer-reviewed journal. How could this possibly pass peer review?
- blibble 3y ago> How could this possibly pass peer review? they've probably outsourced that to generative AI too
- amyjess 3y agoI wouldn't be surprised. I've seen people say that instead of reading articles now, they just open up ChatGPT and say "Summarize the important parts of the following article for me". My experience is that ChatGPT is laughably wrong when it comes to generating any kind of factual information. At best, it's good for feeding ridiculous prompts into it and trying to see what the most cursed thing you can get to spit out is so you can have a laugh.
- geoelectric 3y agoMy experience is querying an LLM usually does ok if the only knowledge it needs is directly included in the prompt (including for summarization). It’s not perfect but its reliability is within the realm of human error and so isn’t significantly worse than me skimming the text myself. But it’s really unreliable if it’s leveraging “knowledge” from its training. Asking what something in an article means, for example, is pretty risky. Open-ended questions that cause knowledge dumps are very risky—the longer the answer, the riskier. Even text translation is risky, even though it’s ostensibly a simple transformation, because it has to draw the word mappings from training. And god help you if you ask it a leading question without realizing it. It’ll often just parrot your assumption back to you. To your point, though, using an LLM as an oracle/teacher would be a lot less dangerous if it were always laughably wrong but it’s usually not. It’s usually 90% right, and that’s what makes it so insidious. Picking out the 10% that isn’t is really hard, especially if you don’t know enough to second-guess it. The wrong stuff usually looks plausible and it’s surrounded by enough valid info that what little you do know seems to corroborate the rest.
- throwaway2046 3y agohttps://archive.is/igJY2 https://archive.is/igJY2
- zabzonk 3y agoperhaps it is all true, and we are all living in end times?
- bitwize 3y agoThe AI figured out how to cross a rat with a tanuki...
- sam537 3y agoNot only that. The JAK "pathway" is complete gibberish. The third figure is a pool of random spheres in "differentiation" steps. The whole Frontiers publishing group is widely seen in academia as worthless, however, since most promotion committees just count the number of publications no matter where they may be, they continue to publish anything and make bank.
- Fomite 3y agoThis has not been my experience with any of the promotion committees I've been on. But Frontiers has been off my list since Frontiers in Public Health published a number of AIDS denialism papers. And yeah, every figure in this paper is nonsensical garbage.
- hermitcrab 3y agoIs the text garbage as well? I don't have any knowledge of the subject area.
- Fomite 3y agoIt's not my field, but it doesn't feel like garbage. Interestingly, the authors do disclose they used Midjourney.
- sam537 3y agoThe text was ok, I do not know anything about spermatogenesis but a fair bit about the JAK/STAT pathway. The abstract was pure LLM, however. It has been retracted.
- hermitcrab 3y agoScientific publishing is a scam. So it is hardly surprising that one of the biggest scientific publishing houses was run by a crook (Robert Maxwell). https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
- ZunarJ5 3y agoWhile there is a lot to be said about that, that's a different affair. This is just Frontiers doing exactly what you'd expect it to do. It's a hot garbage, predatory journal with a low impact factor (low trust, parasites).
- iainctduncan 3y agoPrecisely. And for some reason I'm downvoted for saying it too. Lol These sorts of predatory journals are in the business of publishing anything for page charges .... they don't do real peer review!
- userbinator 3y agoThat second image reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_encabulator
- m3kw9 3y ago“Where do you buy this animal? Asking for a friend”
- renewiltord 3y agoHaha this is great. Somewhere out there some job requires peer-reviewed papers and this journal provides that presumably for a fee. A classic example of meeting the incentives.
- tamaharbor 3y ago[flagged]
- drivingmenuts 3y agoSimple solution: fire the editor. Bit harder: into the sun. Seriously, did anyone even look at it before it was added?
- iainctduncan 3y agoIt is actually Ars Technica that should be ashamed of this article. There is nothing at all newsworthy about a predatory journal publishing garbage, there are soooooo many of these. The fact that the journal says it's "peer-reviewed" is meaningless - they can say that and mean whatever they want it to mean. There are loads and loads of BS predatory journals that are "peer reviewed" but will print anything on their web journals. They charge authors page charges and make money off scammy folks who want to list "publications" on their own websites for credibility points. There is no way real scientists are "aghast" - they are just rolling their eyes. Source: my partner is a scientist and was the managing editor for a legit journal for seven years. She gets hilarious predatory journal spam ALL THE TIME. Page charges are normal for academic journals, so unfortunately it's a scam that's not likely to go away any time soon.
- gs17 3y agoI wonder if this paper will end up getting a lot more as the "rat dck paper" in articles about misuse of AI than it would as an honest publication on the same topic.
- D-Se 3y agoI wonder who paid the US$ 3,295 submission fee for this garbage.