Appall and scorn ripped through scientists' social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article's text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of "dck."
A dck pck, if you will.
Count me among the "some scientists online" who "questioned whether the text was also AI-generated". I mean, it's a disjointed mess. Right off, we get this:
The term “stem cell” was first coined in 1901 by Regaud
Um, no. But if that could be taken for human error, what about a sentence like this:
They were physically sheared and digested with a solution of DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin using a two-step enzymatic digestion method in which the digestive enzymes included DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin.
Just a bit before that, the text does a swerve into what sounds like a specific experiment, which doesn't fit with its surroundings and is very strange in a review article. My guess is the whole thing was made by stitching together LLM responses.
The publisher, Frontiers Media, is not exactly held in high regard overall.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Appall and scorn ripped through scientists' social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal.
But, looking closer only reveals more flaws, including the labels "dissilced," Stemm cells," "iollotte sserotgomar," and "dck."
Many researchers expressed surprise and dismay that such a blatantly bad AI-generated image could pass through the peer-review system and whatever internal processing is in place at the journal.
One scientific integrity expert questioned whether it provide an overly complicated explanation of "how to make a donut with colorful sprinkles."
The image is supposed to provide visual representations of how the signaling pathway from Figure 2 regulates the biological properties of spermatogonial stem cells.
As such, research journals have recently set new authorship guidelines for AI-generated text to try to address the problem.
The original article contains 496 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!