Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
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Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#2Full title is: "Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals"
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#3Some people don't have English as their native language. When such people want to write a scientific article in English they will have to use someone who can write English but probably does not know much about the research. So of course there will be articles with "Tortured Phrases".
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#4I've been seeing this in news articles as well. Swipe someone else's article, run it through a synonym-replacer algorithm, and have Reddit bots post it on a bunch of news subs. Presumably the thesaurus work fools Google's just-a-copy detector.
It's the next step in clickbait monetization. Why settle for low-effort content when you can have no-effort content?
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#5I wish they had kept the method secret. Getting these papers retracted is less valuable than being able to secretly keep tabs on them.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#6Some people don't have English as their native language. When such people want to write a scientific article in English they will have to use someone who can write English but probably does not know much about the research. So of course there will be articles with "Tortured Phrases".
Did you even read the abstract of the TFA? This should not even be a cultural background issue. As an L2 English speaker myself I have never ever thought about throwing a thesaurus onto some established phrase so I can turn “artificial intelligence” into “counterfeit consciousness”, or “deep neural network” into “profound neural organization”. These are deliberate use of fancy words without trying to make sense.
Heck, we got a word for this sort of rampant plagiarism masking on Chinese internet — 洗稿 (manuscript (or blog post)-laundry).
OT: I do appreciate the funny phrase “elite figuring” for HPC. It’s kind of like how they translate things to Anglish.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#7Maybe a future direction would be to train new models to identify plagiarism by training on this information. Use „non matching backtranslations for training classifiers. It’s again the typical cat and mouse game I guess
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#8I've been seeing this in news articles as well. Swipe someone else's article, run it through a synonym-replacer algorithm, and have Reddit bots post it on a bunch of news subs. Presumably the thesaurus work fools Google's just-a-copy detector. It's the next step in clickbait monetization. Why settle for low-effort content when you can have no -effort content?
This is pretty much how corporate news works imo. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen one article then generate a million more.
My favorite example, go to google or DuckDuckGo and type:
“Xxx number hospitalized” or “yyy new cases”
You can type almost any number and get a ton of articles. Not exactly a reprint, but they all seem almost generated
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#9I wish they had kept the method secret. Getting these papers retracted is less valuable than being able to secretly keep tabs on them.
If they are not retracted, they might get cited by other works which themselves might get cited. Suddenly this faked, nonexistent research has been "laundered" into mainstream and nobody knows anymore that there was a problem in the first place.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#10I've been seeing this in news articles as well. Swipe someone else's article, run it through a synonym-replacer algorithm, and have Reddit bots post it on a bunch of news subs. Presumably the thesaurus work fools Google's just-a-copy detector. It's the next step in clickbait monetization. Why settle for low-effort content when you can have no -effort content?
Next will be a hybrid model where no effort content that begins to trend virally gets a human to tweak it for optimization.
Rewriting headlines that bots wrote and A B testing humans vs Software