If you think junk food is bad, wait until you read scientific articles about junk food.
With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), the culprits have moved from the food factory to the scientific paper industry.
An AFP report quotes a researcher as saying that two percent of all scientific papers are estimated to be produced in AI-supported paper mills.
As more and more paper rolls off the paper mill assembly lines, there will be many casualties. But two in particular stand out – academic and scientific institutions – as people lose trust in them.
Let’s start with academia. The academic culture of “publish or perish” is partly responsible for making it so easy for scammers to sell author rights to desperate researchers. It wasn’t always this way.
Admittedly, publishing academic articles in prestigious journals is an old practice. But back then, the culture was more of a “publish at will.”
Finally, one or two publications were enough to prove their scientific value.
Today, this is no longer the case, as there is little or no government funding for these institutions. Universities and research institutes are forced to rely on the prestige of their publications to raise funds.
Malaysian academic institutions have also been affected by the “publish or perish” culture since 2007, when federal funding began to dry up.
There are no figures on how many AI-powered scientific papers have been published by domestic academics, but that does not mean that plagiarized or fake papers are not a problem here.
An even greater concern is the death of science, which human intelligence helped to build but which is in danger of being buried by machine intelligence.
Integrity is the fundamental principle of scientific research. Without integrity, we no longer have any basis for trusting science.
The situation was so serious that 14 years ago, health journalists Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus decided to create Retraction Watch, a website dedicated to tracking and publishing retractions of scientific literature.
Last year there were 10,000 withdrawals, wrote Nature Magazine.
It was noted that this was a sharp increase compared to the declines in previous years and it was described as being just the tip of the iceberg.
One of the reasons given for the flood of bogus papers was fraud in peer review. The not exactly robust academic publication process must also be held responsible.
Want a blatant example of an introduction that recently found its way into an academic journal and was cited by the news agency?
It reads: “Here is certainly a possible introduction for your topic.” It says ChatGPT on it. How this scandalous sentence got past the editors of the scientific journal is a mystery.
Is there a way out of this AI chaos? Yes, there is. But first a point about academic or scientific forgeries.
This happened before the internet age, so we shouldn’t blame AI.
However, the impact of machine intelligence has multiplied.
A good step forward, starting with AI, is to develop machine intelligence in an integrity-friendly way. Science without integrity is just a sham. Another step is to put an end to the “publish or perish” culture.
There are other ways to measure academic prestige. One way to gain prestige is through excellent teaching. Science must be saved, not turned into a farce.
