2y ago

Signs of undeclared ChatGPT use in papers mounting

retractionwatch.com

45 comments

I've heard many papers are published to never be read by humans. It only makes sense that some portion of those papers aren't written by humans either.
I wonder what the overlap is between AI assisted papers and papers with few to no readers.
- The whole system should get ready for the 21st century.
  Most of the scientists arent great writers. It does not make sense to still force them to be a good writer.
  Let be fishes be good at swimming instead of climbing trees.
  In a modern world where basically EVERYTHING is specialized and no generalist is alive anymore we should make use of language tools.
  Hell Chatgpt writes an introduction which is fun to read instead or my overcomplicated bullshit that I would have brought up
  Edit: the comment was not related to the OP but to a general chatgpt discussion.
  
  One important thing is that you have potential. ChatGDP will write something alright-ish, but it's literally impossible for it to move beyond that. It doesn't have the power of creativity.
  Writing is painful, but it also helps us think clearer about our work and contribution. I think it's an important part of the process of doing science, no matter which field. And one gets better at it with training.
  
  It's interesting that you write this because the last place I worked focused on unspecializing by having almost everyone do every job.
  In fact, they relocated across the country to save on building costs, and instead of hiring actual technical writers and office staff, they pushed the extra work down on their engineers because it's more profitable to bill for the engineering time.
  I spent much of my job editing papers and I'm not even good at it while getting paid to do embedded design. It was weird. It was basically fraud but walking the fine line of technically legal.
  I observed this happening multiple times throughout my career. Sometimes, inefficiency is the point in this case driven by capitalists and market forces.
  
  ... Did you read the article? Language tools like grammarly and deepL are in use by scientists today. Copying+pasting the output of chatGPT without ever looking at it, or even using a language tool to publish thoughts that were never in your head to begin with, is the actual concern
  
  I agree, I have no problem with people guiding chatgpt to help them write something they want and they checked it.
  Generating bunch of articles even they didn't read is something else.
ok sorry side note, 40 FUKKEN EUROS TO READ IT? do they want their research read or not
- It's worse than that. Authors actually pay (up to several thousand dollars) to publish, the editors who find referees are doing this as a side job, so probably they're not exactly overpaid either. Finally you have the anonymous referee, who not only doesn't get paid, but they get literally zero recognition. Also, papers aren't printed in journals any more, they are online only, so there's no printing fee either, there's only just server hosting costs, paying some people for language editing and final typesetting (in many fields authors must submit LaTeX manuscripts, basically ready for publishing). And profit of course.
  
  Yep, it’s a fucking embarrassment. Clearly science and academia stopped attracting our brightest and best a while ago or their egos are so fragile they’re as easy to manipulate as children. Either way, institutionally, very poor leaders and caretakers of institutions, which truly undermines the faith we can have in the quality of research they are doing.
  
  Okay but who gets the 40 euros then? All goes for server maintenance costs?
- That's the publishers fee, the authors typically don't get paid for their work to be published. It costs a couple grand to get your paper published and free for the general public.
  
  Also a fee for the universities, who need to subscribe to the journals for the authors to be able to read their own fucking work.
  Which btw is most often paid for by the respective countries.
@floofloof They charge €40 for access, yet one is left wondering what sort of peer review this paper has undergone when obvious signs of generative AI has slipped in. What about less obvious signs? If the "authors" had simply used the copy-to-clipboard icon in chatgpt, they would have been all good and this would never have been uncovered.
If anything, this is an argument for free public access to scientific papers. Any experts on AI could scan and detect this, even when it's more subtle.

45 comments