Academics and Ethics: We Can Make It Up, Right?
July 4, 2023
![Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]](http://arnoldit.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t1-4.gif "Vea4_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_thumb_t[1]")
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
Bogus academic studies were already a troubling issue. Now generative text and image algorithms are turbocharging the problem. Nature describes how in, “AI Intensifies Fight Against ‘Paper Mills” that Churn Out Fake Research.” Writer Layal Liverpool states:
“Generative AI tools, including chatbots such as ChatGPT and image-generating software, provide new ways of producing paper-mill content, which could prove particularly difficult to detect. These were among the challenges discussed by research-integrity experts at a summit on 24 May, which focused on the paper-mill problem. ‘The capacity of paper mills to generate increasingly plausible raw data is just going to be skyrocketing with AI,’ says Jennifer Byrne, a molecular biologist and publication-integrity researcher at New South Wales Health Pathology and the University of Sydney in Australia. ‘I have seen fake microscopy images that were just generated by AI,’ says Jana Christopher, an image-data-integrity analyst at the publisher FEBS Press in Heidelberg, Germany. But being able to prove beyond suspicion that images are AI-generated remains a challenge, she says. Language-generating AI tools such as ChatGPT pose a similar problem. ‘As soon as you have something that can show that something’s generated by ChatGPT, there’ll be some other tool to scramble that,’ says Christopher.”
Researchers and integrity analysts at the summit brainstormed ideas to combat the growing problem and plan to publish an action plan “soon.” In a related issue, attendees agreed AI can be a legitimate writing aid but considered certain requirements, like watermarking AI-generated text and providing access to raw data.
Post-docs and graduate students make up data. MidJourney captures the camaraderie of 21st-century whiz kids rather well. A shared experience is meaningful.
Naturally, such decrees would take time to implement. Meanwhile, readers of academic journals should up their levels of skepticism considerably.
But tenure and grant money are more important than — what’s that concept? — ethical behavior for some.
Cynthia Murrell, July 4, 2023
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
