What's the point of this? To waste the time of foreign scientists? Would we call this science warfare?
Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
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Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#32I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?
This is an Elsevier journal. Due to a mistake by Elsevier, these papers were published without review.
University libraries who continue to pay Elsevier should know that they are propping up scammers and grifters.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#33I feel like only the highest profile journals can be trusted at this point. How long will it take academia to adapt?
Not even those! The impact factor of a journal is a terrible guide to quality. It is more appropriately thought of as a measure of scientific sex appeal. You must read each paper to judge its merits. Lots of junk gets published in top ranked journals.
There's an order of magnitude difference between the worst paper published in a good venue vs. the "tortured" fake papers in fake journals though.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#34What's the point of this? To waste the time of foreign scientists? Would we call this science warfare?
It's resume inflation.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#35This is anecdotal evidence at best, but it is worth considering. I know of several individuals who were able to complete their entire Master's thesis utilizing a combination of AI generated content (GPT-3) and a paraphrasing tool.
The generated text was well over 50 pages, completely bypassed all known content/plagiarism checks and was even included in the Universities "exemplary examples". To this day, it is still there.
This is of significant concern as some of these GPT-3 based tools are now integrated within MS Word itself. Word 2021 allows for "add-ons", out of which I have noticed several third party content generation and paraphrasing tools.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#36I'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
Even more entertaining would be all the traffic being from bots trying to do the same thing.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the classical problem of people trying to find technological solutions to social problems. If plagiarism and fake research is still a problem after we've applied technology to fight it, clearly we haven't applied enough of it.
Sometimes technological solutions work really well to solve social problems. For example, at one point, one person using the internet would tie up the phone line for everyone else in the house, and vice versa. Negotiating this shared resource could be considered a household social problem. But now there's no such interference, and most people have their own cell phones.
This is a social problem around the shared use of a technological resource. I'm reminded of the old saying, "computers can only solve problems that are created with computers".
But then again you can view _all_ solutions to social problems as inherently technological in the broader sense; I adhere to that paradigm.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#38Maybe 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
Or someone could...read the papers.
Referees have no real incentive to keep quality high. They already don't get anything in return for doing it. (At best they do it for reciprocity/goodwill.) Papers are usually hard to follow, replication rate is abysmal, etc. The incentives are all set for publishing, not for making real progress.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#39I ran into something like this in an amazon review once. I was looking for a book of transcriptions for the instrument I play, and two of the handful of reviews used the same awkward phrase: "music goals". I scratched my head and then realized what probably happened. They weren't native english speakers and they were being paid to write reviews and they had gotten the wrong synonym. "music goals" was supposed to be "music scores".
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#40This will come as no surprise to FE/HE lecturers the world over...
What is FE/HE?