Sure AI will kill us all, but I still love the giant penis rat.
I don’t know that I would call this very surprising, but…
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.
Gray estimated that over 60,000 studies might have used AI somehow, but he couldn’t say exactly how many . A lot of them appear to have been, non-native English speakers using AI for translation and drafting, but my fave bits were the straight cut and paste jobs.
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, of course, there is the giant rat’s donger, “an image generated with artificial intelligence for a study on sperm precursor cells.”
I can understand researchers using it as a translation service, that's a logical use case, but for goodness' sake if you've just spent months or years conducting research surely you can write an explanation of it without resorting to spicy autocorrect to help you? *shakes fist at clouds*
Not nearly as good, but there's a US patent specification that has "Fuck you John" written in the disclosure somewhere. If I had to guess, someone stepped away from their open document for the briefest moment...and didn't proof it, and the examiner didn't read the whole thing either (not uncommon in my personal experience).