This will come as no surprise to FE/HE lecturers the world over...
What is FE/HE?
Seems like the UK equivalent of community colleges in the US.
Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
51–60 of 263 posts
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#52This 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 t…
> Master's thesis
I don't doubt this at all, and I have no doubt that GPT-3 with a bit of human editing can spit out something better than the lower third of masters students at corn row colleges.
Masters degrees are cash cows, which is why no one in unregulated industries cares about them. People in regulated/unionized industries also don't actually care; even educators, who at least nominally see intrinsic value in education, go to borderline diploma mills to get that union-mandated raise at minimal effort.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. Time is the only non-fungible asset being burned here and everyone is desperately defending their own allotment.
Then can we at least draw a border around such "science" so that serious people who have work to do know to not waste time with it?
We already know which venues are legit (because we've heard of them) and which aren't (because we haven't).
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#54This 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 t…
Please include a link to these theses, because as it stands this anecdote sounds extremely implausible. I don't know what university you were, but I've been at a few in Europe and at every one of them Master theses were evaluated from the start to the end by several humans. GPT-3 is unable to produce even two pages of coherent text, let alone 50 pages good enough to be accepted as a Master thesis in any discipline at…
Let me clarify:
It was not all automated, there was a fair bit of manual intervention needed. I understand your concerns and they are valid and this is why I preface my statement with "anecdotal evidence". What I write is most certainly not the entire story and a fair bit of detail is left out.
It should be known that this is widespread across multiple industries and this will only become more of an issue in the future.
This is a US-based institution, fully accredited.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#55This 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 t…
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Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#56The paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751.
(We merged this thread and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108111)
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#57This 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 t…
Does Poe's Law cover parody becoming real? Because BBSpot called this nearly 18 years ago: "Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature" https://www.bbspot.com/News/2003/12/autounsummarize.html
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#58And the journal involved, Microprocessors and Microsystems, is an Elsevier journal. Huge surprise. I am glad the publisher earns their outrageous fees by careful screening, peer-review, and editing of submitted manuscripts. /s
Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That's a low bar, though. The point is that it's very difficult to judge the scientific merits of a paper without actually reading it. (And even then, it's easy to be fooled.)
Re: Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
#60I have encountered something similar to this for a submission that I reviewed for a scientific journal. I will not list any names or give much detail past those generalities, but I pointed out that the authors were misusing a particular technical term. In my review I defined the term and explained it briefly. I asked the authors to revise their submission accordingly. The paper was not bad but the authors did not know English very well, so it was quite difficult to read. That was its main problem. However, when I received the revised submission, I noticed that the authors plagiarized my definition and explanation almost word for word (from my confidential review). I pointed this out to the editors and they said to just reject the paper with the stated reason being plagiarism, which I did. The journal ended up rejecting the article, but I discovered it a few years later in a different journal. The plagiarized section remained, but the authors swabbed out a lot my phrases for these kind of "tortured phrases".
That said, the authors did not fabricate their research (as far as I can tell). They just did not know English well, so it was easier to just copy things that you know are phrased well than to learn to write English well. As the saying goes, do not attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance or laziness. That does not excuse it but it makes it more understandable.
I agree with the article that this is probably just the tip of the iceberg. There are likely many more lesser evils being committed with similar tools that are just much more difficult to spot. I would not have noticed my particular example if I were not a reviewer for the paper, for example. It makes me wonder how big the problem really is.