Researchers report AI-generated low-quality content expanding from social media into scientific papers and startup technology releases by substituting polished text for substantive findings
Generated papers now compete with human work for journal space.
The real horror will start when Google Scholar gets tired of crawling/extracting, goes for AI Assist, and starts exporting corrupted/hallucinated citations.. 🤞
@s_r_constantin The vulnerability to AI slop is a wonderful measure for the preexisting sloppiness of an institution
AI represents a multi-fanged threat to academia. It makes it trivial to spam the system with slop that passes surface checks... competing out the human-made academic slop that filled many journals and provided for the careers of many.
Anders Sandberg@anderssandbergReal intellectuals ignore all of this and just go for truth or originality. But they rarely thrive in the academic world, where institutional incentives will be against them.
It may add new kinds of noise: errors of kinds not found before, and harder to remedy. Hallucinated citations are not too bad, but automated citogenesis, emergent academic fashions and AI-perpetrated research fraud are obvious things. It is the non-obvious ones that will bite.
Anders Sandberg@anderssandbergAI represents a multi-fanged threat to academia. It makes it trivial to spam the system with slop that passes surface checks... competing out the human-made academic slop that filled many journals and provided for the careers of many.
It also helps doing checking, potentially also revealing a lot of errors, mistakes and outright fraud. That has not even begun to bite, but may become even more devastating.
Anders Sandberg@anderssandbergIt may add new kinds of noise: errors of kinds not found before, and harder to remedy. Hallucinated citations are not too bad, but automated citogenesis, emergent academic fashions and AI-perpetrated research fraud are obvious things. It is the non-obvious ones that will bite.
AI undermines many forms of gatekeeping by making it easier to make surface-level or actually good outputs even for outsiders. Sure, way more nicely formatted crackpot papers, but also many more independent scholars.
Anders Sandberg@anderssandbergMuch of academia (like many human endeavors) is about maintaining status by claiming relevance, important truths, etc. and then gatekeeping access. At best this produces quality assurances and emergent epistemics, at worst just pompous academics.