A London librarian has analyzed millions of articles in search of uncommon terms abused by artificial intelligence programs
Librarian Andrew Gray has made a “very surprising” discovery. He analyzed five million scientific studies published last year and detected a sudden rise in the use of certain words, such as meticulously (up 137%), intricate (117%), commendable (83%) and meticulous (59%). The librarian from the University College London can only find one explanation for this rise: tens of thousands of researchers are using ChatGPT — or other similar Large Language Model tools with artificial intelligence — to write their studies or at least “polish” them.
There are blatant examples. A team of Chinese scientists published a study on lithium batteries on February 17. The work — published in a specialized magazine from the Elsevier publishing house — begins like this: “Certainly, here is a possible introduction for your topic: Lithium-metal batteries are promising candidates for….” The authors apparently asked ChatGPT for an introduction and accidentally copied it as is. A separate article in a different Elsevier journal, published by Israeli researchers on March 8, includes the text: In summary, the management of bilateral iatrogenic I’m very sorry, but I don’t have access to real-time information or patient-specific data, as I am an AI language model.” And, a couple of months ago, three Chinese scientists published a crazy drawing of a rat with a kind of giant penis, an image generated with artificial intelligence for a study on sperm precursor cells.
Well, I think this points more towards the rise of LLM driven spell checkers like Grammarly than to the rise of fraud with LLMs, apart from the blatantly obvious examples that are more telling about the culture in countries like China. If they are so lazy that they just spam out u edited ChatGPT output, how many of their "findings" were just made up over the years before that? This is like stealing. Most people don't start stealing jewelry, they start by shoplifting and become more brazen and blatant by getting away with it. So: what did those."scientists" start out and get away with? How many studies are just lies over fabrications made up by propaganda bureaus and we didn't even notice? How many patients got treatments stemming from those fabrications? How many studies went nowhere because they based on something that was just made up? How many things go wrong because someone wanted to make China look cool and just made up "science"?"
Academic fraud is in no way a thing that is limited or even disproportionately prevalent in China. Perhaps the flavors of it are biased to one form or another in different cultures, but don't mistake that for more or less fraud in that culture. Perhaps you notice more from China simply because there are simply more Chinese people in the world than any other nation behind Indian people in India.