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[ChatGPT and its ilk are also being used to give fraudulent or shoddy work a new veneer of plausibility, according to Mandy Hill, the managing director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.]

#1

Off the Record / Re: The AI dooooooom thread

Last post by Jacob - Today at 03:41:41 PM

Uh oh scientific publishing...

For more than a century, scientific journals have been the pipes through which knowledge of the natural world flows into our culture. Now they're being clogged with AI slop.

Scientific publishing has always had its plumbing problems. Even before ChatGPT, journal editors struggled to control the quantity and quality of submitted work. Alex Csiszar, a historian of science at Harvard, told me that he has found letters from editors going all the way back to the early 19th century in which they complain about receiving unmanageable volumes of manuscripts. This glut was part of the reason that peer review arose in the first place. Editors would ease their workload by sending articles to outside experts. When journals proliferated during the Cold War spike in science funding, this practice first became widespread. Today it's nearly universal.

But the editors and unpaid reviewers who act as guardians of the scientific literature are newly besieged. Almost immediately after large language models went mainstream, manuscripts started pouring into journal inboxes in unprecedented numbers. Some portion of this effect can be chalked up to AI's ability to juice productivity, especially among non-English-speaking scientists who need help presenting their research. But ChatGPT and its ilk are also being used to give fraudulent or shoddy work a new veneer of plausibility, according to Mandy Hill, the managing director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment.

...

Adam Day runs a company in the United Kingdom called Clear Skies that uses AI to help scientific publishers stay ahead of scammers. He told me that he has a considerable advantage over investigators of, say, financial fraud because the people he's after publish the evidence of their wrongdoing where lots of people can see it. Day knows that individual scientists might go rogue and have ChatGPT generate a paper or two, but he's not that interested in these cases. Like a narcotics detective who wants to take down a cartel, he focuses on companies that engage in industrialized cheating by selling papers in large quantities to scientist customers.

...

Unfortunately, many are fields that society would very much like to be populated with genuinely qualified scientists—cancer research, for one. The mills have hit on a very effective template for a cancer paper, Day told me. Someone can claim to have tested the interactions between a tumor cell and just one protein of the many thousands that exist, and as long as they aren't reporting a dramatic finding, no one will have much reason to replicate their results.

AI can also generate the images for a fake paper. A now-retracted 2024 review paper in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology featured an AI-generated illustration of a rat with hilariously disproportionate testicles, which not only passed peer review but was published before anyone noticed. As embarrassing as this was for the journal, little harm was done. Much more worrying is the ability of generative AI to conjure up convincing pictures of thinly sliced tissue, microscopic fields, or electrophoresis gels that are commonly used as evidence in biomedical research.

Day told me that waves of LLM-assisted fraud have recently hit faddish tech-related fields in academia, including blockchain research. Now, somewhat ironically, the problem is affecting AI research itself. It's easy to see why: The job market for people who can credibly claim to have published original research in machine learning or robotics is as strong, if not stronger, than the one for cancer biologists. There's also a fraud template for AI researchers: All they have to do is claim to have run a machine-learning algorithm on some kind of data, and say that it produced an interesting outcome. Again, so long as the outcome isn't too interesting, few people, if any, will bother to vet it.

...

A similar influx of AI-assisted submissions has hit bioRxiv and medRxiv, the preprint servers for biology and medicine. Richard Sever, the chief science and strategy officer at the nonprofit organization that runs them, told me that in 2024 and 2025, he saw examples of researchers who had never once submitted a paper sending in 50 in a year. Research communities have always had to sift out some junk on preprint servers, but this practice makes sense only when the signal-to-noise ratio is high. "That won't be the case if 99 out of 100 papers are manufactured or fake," Sever said. "It's potentially an existential crisis."

Given that it's so easy to publish on preprint servers, they may be the places where AI slop has its most powerful diluting effect on scientific discourse. At scientific journals, especially the top ones, peer reviewers like Quintana will look at papers carefully. But this sort of work was already burdensome for scientists, even before they had to face the glut of chatbot-made submissions, and the AIs themselves are improving, too. Easy giveaways, such as the false citation that Quintana found, may disappear completely. Automated slop-detectors may also fail. If the tools become too good, all of scientific publishing could be upended.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/01/ai-slop-science-publishing/685704/

#2

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by Duque de Bragança - Today at 03:38:17 PM

Not the best scene, but it leads to a sub-plot of some importance involving the Jimmy Saville chavs. Could have been quicker, admittedly.

Also, the ™ Ultimate Brexit Little England ™ of the previous movie is no longer mentioned.

#3

Off the Record / Re: Brexit and the waning days...

Last post by Tamas - Today at 02:47:26 PM

Speaking of planning permissions, this was a close one. SOMETHING almost got built but thanks to Reyner resigning, it won't: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jan/22/government-ai-datacentre-approval-quashed

#4

Off the Record / Re: It Was Nice Knowing You Al...

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 01:36:51 PM

5 stars are no big deal anyways.  Small fry compared to Pershing.

#5

Off the Record / Re: Israel-Hamas War 2023

Last post by The Minsky Moment - Today at 01:33:13 PM

Neolithic.

Another temple where the God-king can bask in the worship of the sub-kings.

#6

Off the Record / Re: Israel-Hamas War 2023

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 01:30:41 PM

Yeah, probably a better comparator - the Bronze Age system was designed to provide some general societal benefit.

#7

Off the Record / Re: Israel-Hamas War 2023

Last post by Baron von Schtinkenbutt - Today at 01:28:35 PM

I'm thinking something more like the old colonial corporation system.

#8

Off the Record / Re: TV/Movies Megathread

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 01:26:43 PM

I have watched the others, and started watching this one, but really couldn't get past the beginning part where the father, for some unknown reason, takes a terrible unnecessary risk.

#9

Off the Record / Re: Israel-Hamas War 2023

Last post by crazy canuck - Today at 01:22:57 PM

[/li]
[li]A form of imperial multilateralism, where amenable tributaries pay respect to Trump and his power while creating the semblance of an international consensus. Basically it's a pastiche of the UN, designed to undermine it and replacing it with something more malleable to the business objectives of Trump and his allied oligarchs and anti-democratic governments.[/li]
[/list]

Yeah, essentially the Bronze Age tribute system. 

#10

Off the Record / Re: Russo-Ukrainian War 2014-2...

Last post by Crazy_Ivan80 - Today at 12:49:45 PM

now they need to keep it up.
Might also be a good idea to provide Ukraine with some tankers themselves that can be outfitted as drone factories and launchers to sink shadow fleet ships in international waters. Don't flag it as Ukrainian of course.