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A weird phrase is plaguing scientific papers – and we traced it back to a glitch in AI training data
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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The lede is buried deep in this one. Yeah, these dumb LLMs got bad training data that persists to this day, but more concerning is the fact that some scientists are relying upon LLMs to write their papers. This is literally the way scientists communicate their findings to other scientists, lawmakers, and the public, and they're using fucking predictive text like it has cognition and knows anything.
Sure, most (all?) of those papers got retracted, but those are just the ones that got caught. How many more are lurking out there with garbage claims fabricated by a chatbot?
Thankfully, science will inevitably sus those papers out eventually, as it always does, but it's shameful that any scientist would be so fatuous to put out a paper written by a dumb bot. You're the experts. Write your own goddamn papers.
They were translating them not actually writing them like obviously it should have been caught by reviewers but that’s not nearly as bad
Translating them...otherwise know as rewriting the whole paper.
There is a huge difference between asking a LLM “ translate the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” and “ write a sentence about a fox and a dog” when you ask it to translate you can get weird translation issues like we saw here but you also get those sometimes with google translate but it shouldn’t change the actual content of the paper
Have you asked an LLM to translate anything bigger than a few sentences? It doesn't have enough contextual storage to keep a whole paper "in mind" and soon wanders off into nonsense.
Google translate is a different beast.